Greenspace Information for Greater London CIC (GiGL) is the capital’s environmental records centre – we mobilise, curate and share data that underpin our knowledge of London’s natural environment. We enable our stakeholders to make informed decisions in policy and practice. At the start of the reporting period GiGL provided full or part-time employment for twelve employees (11.5 FTE), and ended the year with 13 employees (12.5 FTE). Changes during the year included one of our employees moving on for career progression, and the creation of two new roles funded by the Greater London Authority. In addition to providing formal training to the employees to develop their skills for their roles, we also continued to place an emphasis on engaging with colleagues in other local environmental records centres via the Association of Local Environmental Records Centres (ALERC), as well as all the other national organisations in the National Biodiversity Network. We attended the annual ALERC and NBN conferences and the regular lunch and learn sessions led by ALERC. The focus of our business plan for the year, in addition to business as usual activities, was continuing the development of services relating to biodiversity net gain, and working closely with the Greater London Authority and London Boroughs on developing a local nature recovery strategy for London. We were able to draw on our networks to ensure that some of the smaller voluntary organisations in Greater London were represented in the process and able to contribute their expertise, as well as providing access to the habitat and species data we curate to ensure the plan’s focus was evidence-based. We continued to provide administrative support to key stakeholder groups, including London Boroughs Biodiversity Forum and London Wildlife Sites Board as they are representative of our partners and it helps to maintain our profile with them. The team also ensured GiGL was well represented in other local, regional and national fora including London Invasive Species Initiative, London Urban Forest Partnership and London Green Infrastructure Partnership. We had 41 service level agreements (SLA) in place with organisations that needed access to our data, information and answer services on an ongoing basis to help them factor London’s natural environment into their decisions. This was an increase of two SLAs on 2023/24, both with London Boroughs, and this brought the total number of London Boroughs we were working with up to 32 of 33 including the City of London. This was the highest number of local authorities to work with us since we introduced the SLAs in 2001. There was a 6% increase in the number of data search reports we provided to clients in 2024/25, taking us from 989 reports delivered in 2023/24 to 1044. This also represented a slight increase in the percentage of planning applications informed by our services, from 1.65% the previous year to 1.75%. These increases will have resulted in better informed decisions for nature, but we have a long way to go to reach the recommended 18% figure set by the Mayor of London’s research in 2016. We continued our ongoing promotions to key stakeholder groups including environmental consultants and local planning authorities, presented the figures on our website, and sought feedback from our clients to improve uptake. We provided costings and outlines of how we could support two grant bids by our partners. One was accepted and the bid was successful, and involves helping to write a book on the natural history of Lesnes Abbey Woods in south east London. In addition to delivering work directly for partners under their service level agreements, we were involved in a significant project that reviewed the criteria for designating Sites of Importance for Nature Conservation (SINCs) and how the resulting evidence should be shared. The project was led by London Wildlife Trust, managed by Land Use Consultants and funded by the Greater London Authority. We were able to contribute many years of experience of supporting field survey work to identify new sites and confirm existing designations, our work on data standards, as well as the range of end uses our stakeholders have for the resulting data and information. We have been given a much clearer role in centralising, validating and sharing the evidence base for London going forwards. Four Board meetings were held during the reporting period (BM045 to BM048), one in each financial quarter. Agenda items included standing items such as our financial reports, risk register, and company key performance indicators, as well as new business including salary benchmarking, the need to trademark our name and acronym, and the development of a reserves policy. We provided free services to our community stakeholders, including the Metropolitan Police, students and members of the public per our commitment as a local environmental records centre and social enterprise. We provided four written reports for use by the Metropolitan Police in their Wildlife Crime Unit’s investigations, and supported 19 students in using our data in their research, which included projects looking at the links between air pollution levels and green space provision, water vole conservation and nature and wellbeing. We also provided information to several members of the public to inform their responses to planning applications, or for general interest. We continued to work with our networks of data providers in London, and worked to improve the efficiency of routines to bring in suitable data from web-based portals that would further enhance our core datasets and related services. We added over 1.6 million species records from over 400 separate surveys, reviewed and updated the SINC evidence base, and continued work on refreshing and improving the London-wide habitat dataset. During the reporting period, we renewed our membership of the following organisations: -Association of Local Environmental Records Centres -London Natural History Society -National Biodiversity Network Trust -National Forum for Biological Recording -Social Enterprise UK We also successfully reapplied for accreditation from Social Enterprise World Forum, continuing our status as ‘a genuine People and Planet First’ social enterprise.

Our advisory panel (GAP) met once during the year. The GAP members represent key stakeholder groups from our community and professional networks including local authorities, statutory authorities, regional and national species recording groups and community groups, and our clients. The meeting gave an update to members on the local nature recovery strategy for London, discussed the related species longlist that we were lead on producing, and the general approach to identifying areas in London suited to nature recovery. A review of the way GAP works has resulted in moving to a more agile approach with meetings organised when we require their input and feedback rather than every 3 months. We ran our second ‘London Day of Nature’ for our community network members in October 2024, and once again it was held at London Wildlife Trust’s Camley Street Natural Park. There was a mix of presentations and workshops, including talks from the Greater London Authority, London Geodiversity Partnership and the GB Non-Native Species Secretariat. The workshops aimed to introduce attendees to topics including biological recording, and the Town and Country Planning Association led a session on local site protection in planning. Nearly 80 people attended the day, and the respondents to our satisfaction gave the day an average score of 4.6 out of 5 for ‘usefulness’ and ‘enjoyment’. We published two full newsletters during the reporting period as well as monthly articles, and increased the number of subscribers from 1262 to 1299. Articles covered a range of topics from social impact, updates on projects we were working on with partners, and nature in London. We also published our fifth public-facing annual report, covering the 2023/24 financial year. We have continued to work on our social media presence, and during 2024/25 we: -Saw a significant drop in the number of followers on X (formerly Twitter) from 3342 in Q1 to 3154 in Q4 (9 new followers, nearly 200 left Twitter). We have subsequently focused on Bluesky instead but there are no metrics to measure engagement yet. -Increased the number of followers on Facebook from 683 in Q1 to 695 in Q4 -Increased the number of company page followers on LinkedIn from 573 in Q1 to 689 in Q4 -Increased the number of followers on Instagram from 294 in Q1 to 381 in Q4

£90,750

No transfer of assets other than for full consideration