Organising for delivery

Statement by the Mayor delivered at Mayor’s Question Time, 10 September 2008

I want to begin with my now traditional tribute to the work of the Greater London Authority over the last eight years. On the day I arrived here I stressed that we were lucky to be building on the achievements of the previous Mayor and the previous administration. Those achievements are real.

London won the bid to host the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, and that gives us the chance to achieve regeneration in a part of London that has been neglected for decades. This building helped to introduce Safer Neighbourhood Teams to every ward, the London Plan, a suite of innovative environment strategies and of course the programme of cultural events that I believe have made a real difference to London life, and so today I renew my congratulations, with wholly unrequited generosity, to the previous mayor for his role in helping to bring these things about.

But of course we now want to do new things, and we want to do them better, and it is absolutely vital that we do them more efficiently. To take a metaphor from the environment, I want our work to shine as brightly as ever – to achieve the same or greater incandescence – but with an energy-efficient bulb.

In its original 1998 White Paper, the government envisaged that the GLA should be a small, strategic body. But as new powers have been added, and new ambitions acquired and new schemes conceived there has been a steady expansion of headcount, from 400 in 2001/2002 to 800 today, excluding consultants and agency temporary staff. That is a 100 per cent increase in eight years, and the effects have inevitably felt in our council tax precept, rising from £122.98 in 2001/2002 to £309.92 this year.

And though I appreciate that the expansion of the GLA plays only a part in the precept increase, I believe it is our duty to do everything we can to lift the burden on Londoners.

The people of this city are feeling a serious financial squeeze. It is our job to deliver taxpayer value. It is our job to restore trust in the way we spend their money. That is why my budget guidance is that we work towards freezing the precept next year.

We can do this if we first establish a clear set of priorities, and that means thinking about how we want London to look and feel in 2012, when we welcome the world to our city.

I want a London where we have helped hugely to expand the educational and sporting opportunities available to a generation of London children who are being failed by our schools, and I believe that drive can play a vital part in making this city safer.

I want a London where we mobilise new technology to make transport cleaner, greener, more efficient and more pleasant, with buses that no longer run on diesel, with tube trains that are increasingly air-conditioned, with the beginnings of a revolution – driven by us in this building – in favour of vehicles powered by sustainably generated electricity, and with a thoroughgoing bike hire scheme not just in central London but in the suburbs as well.

I want a London where we respond to population growth with housing which is not only affordable but distinguished, and which will be admired by future generations, where we continuously improve the look and feel of our parks and open spaces, where we have a rolling programme of planting trees and encouraging roof gardens and allotments across the city.

Of course we want a city that not only looks and feels greener, but which also leads the world in low carbon technologies to supply our buildings with heating and cooling and power.

And we will only achieve these improvements if we remember the central importance of the business community, and economic growth, and our role in making London an attractive place to invest. That means dealing with exclusion, and deprivation, and building on the powerful legacy of the Olympics in the east end.

And all that is just for starters. To deliver these priorities I believe this organisation needs to change, so that whatever we do we do well or else not at all. That is why Simon Milton and Jeff Jacobs, as acting head of Paid Service, are now embarked on a programme of work called "Organising for delivery", and they are beginning by looking at organisational design, immediate efficiency improvements and shared service propositions to bring longer-term efficiency improvements. We are proposing to realign our policy development into two areas. The first is called "Communities and Intelligence", with a mission to strengthen communities, tackle deprivation and improve social mobility, and the next is "Development and Environment", with a mission to ensure that London’s growth and infrastructure needs are met in a sustainable way.

I also believe we can get better economies of scale by grouping together activities that currently sit in separate directorates into one Finance and Operations function. This area will focus on driving improvement and efficiency throughout the GLA Group. Our external communications and liaison activities should likewise be aligned, as a Corporate Affairs group, leading our relations with the boroughs, with government, and projecting and explaining our work.

Finally, a separate team will deal with the Olympics reporting directly to me, given the importance and urgency of this work.

I want us to remember we are a strategic body, and as such rely in large part on the Functional Bodies, the Boroughs and other partners to deliver our priorities. I will be working closely with the Functional Bodies’ Boards to do this and will also want to see that our new design enables us to work most effectively.

I shall now be asking Jeff to carry out detailed organisational design. I will expect to see the majority of structural savings coming on stream during the next financial year and they will be fully delivered by 2010/11. Next year’s savings target of £7.5m is already well on the way to being achieved. Circa £1m has already been achieved from the restructuring of my office and £0.5m from stopping my predecessors plans for unnecessary growth. A personal priority of mine has also been to review Press Office and Communications- 20% savings will be made in this area – and I’m extremely grateful for their proactive engagement on this, identifying savings which go beyond what I asked for. Other savings will be achieved through reprioritising programme budgets, existing efficiency programmes and putting a freeze on all but essential recruitment. This will include the 100 vacancies currently on our books. Our expectation is that many of these may be deleted.

More detail on the work done so far, and the organisation design review Jeff will now carry out, will be made available to all staff in presentations today. All communications materials used today will also be available on the intranet. There will be plenty of opportunities for everyone in the GLA to get involved with Organising for Delivery. We need your ideas and your support to make the GLA a better place to work.

It is very likely that the detailed design will lead to some changes in roles and reductions in posts. By freezing all but the most essential recruitment activity and through natural wastage I am confident that we will be able to create redeployment activities for many of our people and minimise the need for large-scale redundancies.

There are challenging times ahead for all of us in the GLA, but I have every confidence in our direction of travel and the way forward. I need the support of all the teams in the GLA to make this work, and look forward to delivering tangible improvements for all Londoners.

Our objective in these reforms is of course not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We now have the chance to get rid of some expensive bathwater, while keeping the bouncing baby that is this young and confident institution.

Corresponding press release (471)