A Night for Elevate

Earlier this year, ING launched Elevate, a programme designed to help smaller built environment businesses with ethnically diverse leadership accelerate success by providing business development, marketing and communications advice on a pro bono basis. This month we celebrated the first cohort passing through the programme by joining forces with The Africa Centre to host a reception featuring a talk from Jules Pipe, Deputy London Mayor for Planning, Regeneration and Skills. On the night, he explained why this, and similar, initiatives matter so much to City Hall.

At City Hall, we understand that it’s crucial that those who shape and design London represent the diversity of the city’s communities. It is, of course, not possible to design an inclusive city without a representative built environment sector.

Elevate is responding to this need for better representation in the industry by addressing some of the structural barriers that practitioners face and tackling those head on, using the skills and networks of ING and its links across the built environment and PR sectors.

And what better place to celebrate the programme’s delivery milestone of successfully supporting its first cohort than here at the Africa Centre, this hugely important institution for Africa and its diaspora in London. I was pleased to attend the opening of the Centre in 2022. The Mayor and I are proud to have been able to support the move to this location and the development of this great building, whose design reflects the Mayor’s priorities around retrofitting and repurposing existing buildings.

I’m pleased to be back here to talk about representation in the built environment sector.

Our primary ambition for London is good growth. This means we do not strive for growth at any cost, but for growth that is socially and economically inclusive, environmentally sustainable and contextual to local places and communities.

London is best served by a built environment sector that is equal, diverse, representative and inclusive. However, recent surveys highlight the issue of under representation in the sector which has an impact on attracting and retaining practitioners who are women or are from minority groups. This data shows that currently only 31 per cent of registered architects are women; this is below the historic peak of 40 per cent before the economic crash in 2008. Of these, a disproportionate number are leaving the profession as their career progresses, suggesting a culture that doesn’t support women’s advancement. There also continues to be too few disabled architecture students successfully progressing into practice.

Both the Architect Journal’s Race Diversity and LGBTQ+ surveys reveal organisational cultures where racist, homophobic and transphobic behaviour is not challenged by leaders.

The lack diversity at the top of most of the businesses involved in London’s built environment sector further compounds the challenge. This under-representation of minority groups and women limits their opportunities to thrive in a growing sector of London’s economy. Crucially underrepresentation poses a barrier to achieving the inclusive city that we all want.

We simply can’t achieve that vision of an inclusive London if the people who design, plan, build and make decisions about our city don’t reflect the people it serves. Promoting representation in the sector is a long-held priority at City Hall. We continue to promote this through all the levers at our disposal, which mainly include advocacy, mentoring and procurement.

Recognising that there are different challenges and responses needed at each stage of an individual’s career, we published the ‘Supporting Diversity Handbook’ in 2019, which has helped to set the agenda within the sector. Embedding inclusion in professional practice was further complimented by our work with the six built environment institutes with a shared membership of more than 350,000 professionals, where we promoted the need for a more joined up approach across the sector on culture and education.

Our emerging practice support and mentoring programme acknowledges that setting up a practice in the industry is one of the stages where we see the most acute drop-off in representation and is tailored to provide built environment practices with leadership support and mentoring courses to help these practices thrive.

Significantly, our commitment to supporting inclusion in the sector is reflected in the actions we have taken to align our procurement practices with this ambition.

The Mayor invests significant sums of public money in infrastructure, new housing and regeneration projects, as do other public authorities in London. This commissioning clout is an opportunity to push for service delivery from a more diverse and inclusive sector.

An important tool in doing so has been the establishment of the Architecture + Urbanism Framework Panel. This framework of pre-approved built environment consultants makes it quicker and easier for organisations like councils and housing associations to commission high quality expertise for public sector projects in London. It can be used by any public sector commissioning authority in the UK.

In seeking to establish a framework of consultants that was more representative of London’s diversity, the procurement process for the Architecture + Urbanism Framework included a progressive and multifaceted approach, including mandatory scoring criteria for EDI and social value.

I’m pleased to see that the hard work we put into developing the framework has resulted in an excellent and diverse framework of experienced practitioners being awarded places, with 58 per cent of the 97 places on the framework held by ‘diverse-led’ enterprises.

There is certainly still work to be done, but I hope you will all agree with me that the framework is a step in the right direction, and one which I hope inspires other organisations to do the same.

Jules Pipe
Deputy Mayor of London for Planning, Regeneration and Skills