Greater London Authority Bill

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. The West London waste authority is 217th out of all 393 English authorities and, as he says, did not meet its target. The London statutory plan shows that 308 additional facilities would be required by 2020. That message was reinforced in the past six months by the National Audit Office report stating that all local authorities need to make a step change in planning and performance if landfill targets for 2010 and beyond are to be met. London is also poor in relation to planning for waste facilities. No boroughs have prioritised waste planning in their local development schemes. Consequently, London will be without site-specific allocations of land for waste for the next three to four years—possibly the most critical time scale when London should be putting in place waste facilities to serve the future generations. That cannot inspire confidence in those who must finance and build these facilities. We have a system that is a developing crisis. Some boroughs have recognised it and are seeking to do the best they can, but the overall picture does not provide any room for optimism. I would also like briefly to mention the issue of general conformity. The Bill proposes this new legal requirement on the boroughs, which will have to ensure that they are in general conformity with the Mayor’s waste strategy. That is a legal minefield and a recipe for deadlock. Local authorities and the Mayor will be tied together in continuous judicial reviews and London council tax payers will foot both sides of the lawyers’ bills. The outcome will be critical delays in the delivery of overdue waste infrastructure and service improvements. So far, since 2003 the Mayor has had to use his powers of direction four times to ensure compliance with the municipal waste management strategy. Three directions relate to the West London waste authority, picking up the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Erith and Thamesmead (John Austin) just made, and one to the London borough of Enfield. Each decision is subject to judicial review, but none of them has yet been heard and none of the issues raised has been resolved to date. Surely the new duty for general conformity is an open invitation to confrontation and argument. I fail to see how it will contribute to a system that needs to speed up rather than slow down in order to deliver.