Workspace Accreditation Securing affordable workspace for London

Open workspaces, coworking and shared office spaces are a vital part of London’s entrepreneurial society, in their role providing micro and small businesses with flexible and affordable space to start and grow.

Following the recommendation from the Affordability Crisis reports, we at City Hall commissioned the Workspace Accreditation Pilot in October 2019, to help ensure London’s workspaces survive and thrive. The pilot scheme recognises affordable workspaces that offer valuable community impact and business support to their tenants/members and local communities, and operate responsible business practices.

Like many other sectors, the workspace sector has been greatly impacted by the COVID-19 crisis. The crisis underlines the importance of the workspace accreditation scheme, which gives policy makers and grant givers a verified list of workspaces offering impact in terms of opportunities and job creation and provides businesses with a place to go when seeking affordable space, access to a peer community and support. A full overview of the scheme can be found via the website.

Eight London Local Authorities and 12 workspace providers have been working through the pilot since early 2020. Participating workspaces complete an application form and provide accompanying evidence to meet the accreditation criteria. This then assessed and next steps are recommended. Once the workspace meets all criteria and evidence requirements, they are recommended for accreditation. One of the interesting learnings from the pilot so far is that in several cases, where workspaces have not initially fully met a criteria, they have looked for advice and support from the pilot team at Capital Enterprise, peer workspaces and / or their local authority and improved their practices. This is just one of the reasons that I am optimistic that overall the accreditation deepens the community impact of London’s workspaces. Ultimately this will support more Londoners to start and grow or sustain businesses. 

 After a few months of working through this process, I am delighted to announce the first workspace to be accredited under the pilot scheme is The Granville in the London Borough of Brent.

The Granville is a high quality, multi-purpose space run by the South Kilburn Trust. South Kilburn Trust’s charitable work supports local people through affordable space and access to free and low cost opportunities. The building houses a number of offers to the community and South Kilburn Trust continues to work with the community to find more ways to expand this offer.

I look forward to see how other spaces are accredited as they progress through the final stages of the assessment process.

Learnings, findings and recommendations are collected regularly by the team throughout the delivery of the pilot, with the aim of using these learnings to contribute to building a planned wider rollout of the scheme pan London.

On Thursday 15th October 2020 we will be hosting an event where we will share all findings and learnings from the pilot, plans for the wider rollout, and plans for accompanying sector coordination work. Full details of the event will be shared in due course.

In the meantime, if you are interested in attending the event on 15th October or in finding out more about the scheme, please get in touch with my team at [email protected]