Emily Robinson, Chief Executive, London Sport
It can feel daunting to put yourself out there and claim you are doing well on equality, diversity and inclusion because there is always so much more to do. But I am proud of the progress we’ve made at London Sport and we want to celebrate what has gone well as well as reflect on plans to go further.
London is one of the most diverse cities in the world. If London Sport is going to help create a city where everyone has the opportunity to be active, we need to understand, reflect and represent the communities we serve.
That is the thinking behind ‘Becoming More Like London’ – an ambition we first set ourselves in 2018, with commitment from the top of the organisation and support from our Board throughout this journey.
It has always been about more than the make-up of our workforce. It means creating an organisation where people feel they belong; understanding the different experiences and barriers faced by Londoners; designing inclusion into our work from the outset; and using our influence to help make London’s wider sport and physical activity system more equitable.
In 2024, we took another significant step with the publication of our first three-year Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan (DIAP), setting out four internal and four external objectives and a commitment to regularly review our progress.
Two years on, we’ve learnt a lot and made good progress. But we’ve also have a much clearer understanding of where we need to go further.
One of the most important shifts we’re trying is from EDI being seen as a specialist function or initiative, to being everyone’s everyday responsibility and a default way of working.
In practice, that means thinking about inclusion, equity and representation when we recruit someone, commission a supplier, organise an event, develop a campaign, analyse data or design a new programme – rather than adding it as a consideration at the end.
I’m so proud to lead an organisation where everyone shows up to inclusion training, is engaged and takes it seriously.
We want to encourage the same shift more widely away from inclusion being considered optional or something targeted at particular groups, towards inclusion being designed in from the outset and understood as a shared responsibility across the whole system.
What has changed?
We’ve strengthened our approach to recruitment, including anonymised applications, criteria-based scoring, trained interview panels, webinar information sessions and advertising roles more widely to help to reach more diverse talent pools.
This has resulted in significant changes to the make-up of our workforce across the board. Since 2018, the proportion of our workforce from global majority backgrounds has increased from 9% to 28%, while the proportion of colleagues with a long-term health condition or disability has doubled from 7% to 14%. Women now make up 46% of our workforce, compared with 44% in 2018,. Women are also strongly represented in leadership, making up 33% of our board, 80% of our Senior Leadership Team and 47% across our Senior and Operational Leadership Teams combined.
We’re also attracting a more diverse pool of candidates, with the proportion of applicants from global majority backgrounds increasing from 30% in 2019 to 46% in 2025, and the proportion of applicants who are disabled or have a long-term health condition increasing from 2% to 7% over the same period.
Importantly, inclusion is also reflected in how our people feel about working here: in February 2026, 93% of staff agreed that London Sport values inclusivity and 93% that we celebrate diversity.
We’ve invested significantly in staff learning – covering areas including microaggressions, antisemitism, Islamophobia, disability and deaf awareness, trans and non-binary awareness, sexual harassment prevention and anti-racism.
We’ve also made accessibility a more consistent part of our communications. Our commitments include captioning video content and providing appropriate alt text for digital assets, alongside considering accessibility earlier in the planning and creation process – from clear and simple language and readability to colour contrast, visual presentation and how content can be accessed by people using assistive technologies.
The aim is to make accessibility part of our everyday approach to communications, rather than something added as a final check. It’s an area where we’re continuing to learn and improve, but also one where we’ve made good progress: communications was our highest-scoring area in the independent benchmarking, recognising our commitment to communicating EDI meaningfully and consistently across different channels.
And crucially, we’re increasingly trying to make inclusion part of what we deliver, rather than simply how we operate internally – working with communities and people with lived experience to understand the barriers they face and co-design better solutions. That matters because tackling inequality is core to our mission – helping Londoners, particularly those in the most deprived communities, have fairer access to sport and physical activity.
Putting ourselves to the test
We don’t want to judge our progress solely by our own standards. When we published our DIAP, we committed to external benchmarking to give us a clearer picture of where we were making progress and where we needed to improve.
Earlier this year, we worked with Diversity Marketplace to assess our practice against the Global Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Benchmarks (GDEIB).
There was plenty to be encouraged by. The assessment highlight strengths in the way EDI is embedded within our mission, our governance structure, our approach to accessible communications and marketing, flexible working, staff learning and our community and place-based work. It also recognised the safeguards we’ve put in place to reduce bias in recruitment and our proactive approach to reaching underrepresented talent.
It has also helped identify where we need to do more. In particular, it highlighted opportunities to further strengthen leadership accountability, progression and succession, enhancing how we monitor and ensure pay equity, going further on responsible sourcing and procurement, and the connection between our EDI and environmental sustainability agendas.
Turning the evidence into action
We’ve used the findings from the benchmarking exercise to help shape our 2026/27 Diversity and Inclusion Annual Action Plan, prioritising actions for this year while recognising some of the recommendations will form part of our longer-term work.
The plan also reflects our aim to embed EDI into how London Sport operates, rather than treating it as a standalone workstream. It combines activity that has now become business as usual with ten priority actions for the year ahead. Progress is overseen through our EDI governance structure, including our Trustee-led EDI Sub-Committee, helping to ensure continued Board-level scrutiny, support and accountability.
These priority actions include making progression pathways clearer; strengthening how we monitor flexible working and family-related decisions; embedding EDI criteria within procurement and commissioning; developing a more consistent approach to incorporating lived experience into our projects; and establishing minimum inclusion and accessibility standards for our events and engagement.
We’re also strengthening the way we measure our external EDI impact, helping us better understand the difference our work is making.
Our ambition for the future
We want to keep improving our own practice, while using what we learn to support progress across London’s sport and physical activity sector. That means sharing our learning and practical tools, listening to different experiences and learning from others too.
Eight years after we first set ourselves the ambition of Becoming More Like London, we’ve made good progress – but we know there is much more to do. Our latest action plan sets out our next steps and reinforces our commitment to keep listening, learning and improving.
Ultimately, our ambition is simple – to better reflect and understand the communities we serve, and help make sport and physical activity more inclusive and accessible – so that every Londoner has the opportunity to live a longer, healthier and happier life, no matter their postcode.
To watch our Diversity & Inclusion Action Plan video, click here.
