Greater London Authority Bill

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right—I, too, am in danger of agreeing with the Liberal Democrats too much. That view is common sense, and is recognised on a cross-party basis by London councils and all the principled parties of the London assembly. If we are going to make London governance credible to the people of London, as many of us genuinely want it to be, there must be a sense that there are proper checks and balances in the system. It is the lack of checks and balances that undermines the credibility of the current devolved system in London. I had no problem with the Mayor receiving some extra powers, on climate change and other issues. I know that we are going to disagree over planning, for the reasons that we have outlined, because we see the proposals as centralising. As I have said before, I would have liked the Minister to go further and get rid of the Government office for London. I would also like more to be devolved to the city governance level. However, the more devolution we have, the more we need a sensible and mature set of checks and balances. That is what is missing. That is also where the Government have fallen for the Mayor’s siren song, in suggesting that a strong-Mayor model—that was the mantra that was trotted out—precludes a meaningful say for the assembly. With respect, that view is flawed, and the New York example is a demonstration of that. The city council in New York has a significantly stronger hold over the budget than the assembly does over the Mayor in London. The Minister might be surprised at that, but under the charter of New York city, the council can change the mayor’s budget in much more detail than the assembly is permitted to in London. The New York city council can change individual budget heads, and can do so by a simple majority. That the New York city council does not achieve that in practice is down much more to the political culture than to the one-party domination of the Democratic party or anything else. Legally, the strong-Mayor model in New York gives the legislature—the city council, the assembly equivalent—much more power than the assembly. It is particularly strange that there should be an insistence on the two-thirds majority, when we happen to have a proportional representation system. I do not much like the proportional representation system—it is not what I would have preferred—but it seems needless to have the double complication of PR plus a two-thirds majority. If the desire is that a Mayor should be obliged to seek a reasonably broad coalition to get his budgets through, he would have to do so under a PR system, come what may. There is no need for the extra hurdle of a two-thirds majority. That creates an artificial situation, which undermines the credibility of the whole structure. As my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, Central said, if any of us talk to our constituents about the assembly, they ask, ““What did you do about the Mayor’s precept?”” I say, ““I voted against it, but we didn’t have the numbers.”” However, if they then ask how many of us there were, and I say that 15 or 16 of us voted against it but only nine voted for it, they think, ““You must be mad if that means it went through.”” Nothing that I can think of could be more deliberately designed to make people cynical about the democratic process than an entrenched system that says that, by Act of Parliament, the loser wins. However, that is exactly what we have. That is crazy, and it makes London governance less credible. On a separate point, it is a great shame, too, that the Government have not considered the assembly’s sensible suggestion.