The Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) is an Executive Non-Departmental Public body accountable to the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. It was established by the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act 2006 on 30th March 2006. It exists to deliver venues, facilities, infrastructure and transport for the Games. It is also the statutory Planning Authority for the Olympic Park area.

Our MD and her team has worked with the ODA providing expert consultancy on E&D since inception. Key projects have included:

Embedded Consultancy
The Global Diversity Practice was procured by ODA in August 2006 to provided embedded consultancy with the overall objective of leading and co-ordinating the equality and inclusion work of the Olympic Delivery Authority. This project included providing:

• Recommendations on onsite welfare facilities for a diverse workforce
• Report on equality-related legal responsibilities of the ODA
• Report on outcome of stakeholder consultation and interim recommendations for urgent action
• Draft Equality and Diversity Strategy
• Recommendations on equality in employment, communications to a diverse audience, KPIs for equality
• Development of equality and diversity action plan
• Key stakeholder engagement on draft strategy and final draft strategy for Board
• Race Equality Scheme, including extensive consultation with Black, Asian and minority ethnic groups
• Approach to Equality Impact Assessment
• Extensive engagement with the procurement team on the procurement policy, equality and diversity-related contract clauses, PAQ questions, PQQ questions and ITT questions, including acting as consensus evaluator in one PQQ assessment;
• Integration of equality and diversity into the Health and Safety Standard;
• Identification of gaps in delivery arrangements for E&D, in particular in relation to development of equality monitoring
• Planning key E&D milestones for 07/08 business plan.
• Development of Gender Equality Scheme
• Completion of Equality Impact Assessment of procurement function
• Management of consultation on draft equality and diversity strategy
• Development of involvement mechanisms for disabled people.

Due to the success of the projects, the practice were requested by the ODA to progress work specifically linked to the Equality and Diversity Strategy - this included;

• Targets - determination of approach to targets, and incorporation of targets into draft strategy
• Engagement with the Olympic stakeholders (GLA and DCMS) on the draft strategy, action plan and targets and amendment of draft strategy and action plan as appropriate
• Feedback to other external stakeholders involved in initial stakeholder consultation on progress and next steps, to avoid leaving them in a vacuum
• Further development of action plan, including detailed assessment of budgets required, establishment of indicative timescales and milestones for all actions, working with Directors’ nominated representatives to establish ownership and undertake initial hand-holding until individuals are able to confidently assume ownership of their actions.
• Assistance to Communications Directorate in developing plans for public consultation during the period January – February 2007. These plans needed to meet the legal requirements of the race equality and disability equality duties.
• Engagement with external organisations concerned with occupational gender segregation, (alongside Delivery Partner and LETF stakeholders) to firm up specifics of “a visible contribution to combating occupational gender segregation in construction and allied areas”.

Our relationship with the ODA continues to go from strength to strength with the award of additional contracts including:

• E&D Procurement Evaluations – We provided a team of suitably qualified assessors for the evaluation of the equalities and diversity element of tender pre-qualification questionnaires and full tenders.
• E&D Training - The ODA and CLM Delivery Partner Ltd (Delivery Partner) are working together to implement an Equality and Diversity Training Plan. One strand of that plan is to provide all ODA/Delivery Partner staff with specific Equality & Inclusion Awareness training. Our role is to provide ODA/Delivery Partner staff (approx 400 people) with the opportunity to attend a one day interactive awareness workshop covering all strands of diversity.