Greater London Authority Bill

The noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, and the noble Lord, Lord Tope, quite properly made enormous efforts to depersonalise this amendment. However, I hope that the Committee will forgive me if I refer to it as the Greg Dyke amendment because we seem to have an attempted agreement between the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Parties, which are clearly faced with a situation in which they are not confident that they could defeat the current incumbent. While no doubt they would argue that this is not about the current office holder but rather the office, I suspect that the opposite is true. Having said that, I wish to address the principle of the amendment. I am not sure that it is correct that mayors of New York are limited to two terms. I can think of a number who have served more than two terms but the arrangements may have changed since then so I am not sure whether that is accurate. However, I am conscious that there are no such precedents in this country as regards elected office. That is a very important point. The noble Lord, Lord Tope, referred to the Nolan principles with regard to public bodies. However, those principles apply to people holding responsibilities by virtue of appointment and patronage. That is the distinction. In this case, if there is patronage, it is the patronage of the electorate. I wonder about the arrogance of saying to the people of London that they cannot choose to re-elect somebody for a third term if that is what they wish to do. The points made about people becoming stale and less responsive may or may not have been directed at the present incumbent. However, they imply that winning a third term is probably more difficult than winning a second and that winning a fourth term is certainly more difficult than winning a third. But the point is that the people of London should decide whether they want a Mayor to serve for three consecutive terms, or for a third term having served two terms earlier. I wonder whether the parties opposite are suggesting not so much that there should be term limits for the Mayor of London but that the same should apply to elected councillors, London Assembly members or Members of Parliament. If we go down this road, we shall change very much the nature of the relationship between the electorate and the people they elect. The principle is very simple—that the electorate should be allowed to make their own judgment whether they want to have the same elected representative in that office as the one they have twice chosen previously.