The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent national lockdowns have had a significant impact on businesses of all sizes, particularly small businesses. Therefore, it is essential that small businesses are adequately supported to enable their sustainable recovery from the pandemic. The Mayor of London has assembled the London Recovery Board (LRB) to oversee and push forward initiatives to support the long-term recovery of unemployment rates, small business closures and lost economic growth caused by the pandemic. This report has identified two important factors which are crucial to businesses’ ability to grow and survive and have subsequently been impacted by the pandemic: (1) growing and maintaining social networks and (2) dealing with uncertainty. The impact of the pandemic on these factors has ultimately limited the ability of small businesses to develop their knowledge of business administration and obtain investor financing. Anchor institutions are private or public organisations which have the potential to make genuine social and economic impacts to their localities due to their size and spending power; they have been identified as important actors in the city (GLA, 2021). By using their spending power through procurement, anchor institutions have an important role in helping small businesses recover from the pandemic. Public and private anchor institutions can provide this support by establishing local procurement policies. To help anchor institutions strategically target resources, this report analysed the impact of COVID-19 on small businesses by industry. In addition, a tool has been developed for anchor institutions to use to help small businesses. The function of the tool is to help anchor institutions make informed decisions about setting and assessing the effectiveness of their local procurement policies. The tool does this by plotting the locations of small businesses and anchor institutions. This allows anchor institutions to identify where and what small businesses are in their locality. Coupled with a list of small businesses who were offered tenders, the tool also allows institutions to see how many small businesses they have offered service/product tenders to out of the total number of small businesses in the same industry, and therefore, the effectiveness of their local procurement policies.

Investigation into the impact of Covid-19 on the travel choice and behaviour, including how perceptions of public transport changed

Taking an intersectional feminist and rhythmanalysis approach to explore the embodied experience of pregnant women and new mothers in the built environment to find out what their needs are and how existing urban planning and design fails to meet them.

This research provides an insight into the views of stakeholders in order to establish conversations that may contribute to the future e-scooter landscape in London. Through a stakeholder survey, alignments and misalignments regarding the expected use and impacts of e-scooters are understood, both in the Covid-19 impacted short-term and post-pandemic long-term. The conversation is extended through a scenario planning and backcasting exercise to understand desirable futures and associated policy pathways. Furthermore, the research discusses a previously simplistic view of uncertainty within futures studies and suggests an alternative view.