Greater London Authority Bill

That is certainly the case. It is necessary for the Assembly to be provided with the candidate’s application form for information purposes. It was simply a convenient way of bringing all the desirable information together. If the Government would regard this as a point of principle and not leave it as a matter for a request which might be turned down—I shall come to that in a moment—perhaps there might be a meeting of minds at a later stage. As regards the entitlement to request a candidate to produce documents—it is documents that we are talking about—leaving the Assembly to draw its own conclusions if the candidate does not do so, that seems to me to be both a rather tortuous way of going about things and not a good basis on which the Assembly can make a recommendation to the Mayor. For the Assembly to hold a confirmation hearing and end up by saying to the Mayor, ““We did not get the information that we needed, so we do not think you should go ahead and appoint this person””, does not seem to me to be appropriate.