Greater London Authority Bill

moved Amendment No. 23: The noble Baroness said: I shall speak also to Amendment No. 24 and to the whole of Clause 7. This clause concerns the appointment of staff to the Greater London Authority; that is, those staff who, apart from the 12 direct appointments the Mayor can make, implement the Mayor’s policies and put together strategies, as well as the Assembly staff. When the original Act was designed, two checks and balances were written into it. One was that staffing arrangements would be a matter for the Assembly. Staffing issues cover not only the terms and conditions for individual members of staff, but also the size of the establishment; that is, the number of posts in the authority. Putting on my current hat once more, given that we are governed by local government access to information provisions that allow access to meetings, the current practice is for the Assembly to hold committee meetings with agendas published in advance in the usual way, and for the views of staff, both as a result of direct individual staff consultation and as expressed through the union, to be reported. The committee meets in public and its meetings are webcast and minuted. I say all that because transparency is important in all this. The Assembly very much follows a local authority model where there is openness about how these things are arrived at. No one has convinced me, or has even found an example that convinced me, of what is wrong with the current position. I have seen no example during the consultation on changes to the Act, or in discussion about it, nor from what I can see from reading Hansard for the debate in the Commons. The Minister in the Commons talked about anticipating potential tensions between the Mayor and the Assembly. He talked about this being potentially subject to the, ““disagreements, rows, trade-offs and arguments that inevitably take place between them. I am not sure that any of that is necessarily a bad thing in itself, but that is not really the point. After seven years, we are told that a change should take place to avoid a ““potential”” problem. I would not characterise this clause as being, ““not a major change, and it will not cause problems or substantial difficulties in any quarter. It is a relatively sensible, not hugely interesting change that will improve support for the GLA staff””. It has been put to me that terms and conditions of employment are really a matter for the officer head of an organisation, not for Members in this case or the board, if we were talking about a private company. Certainly, the Assembly has almost invariably followed the recommendations of officers as regards terms and conditions. This is completely off the top of my head, I did not bother to go back and look through our agendas, but examples that occur to me of matters that were discussed in public are, for example, when there was a change in the salary structure. That was not an easy process. Of course, a lot of work was undertaken before it came to committee, but it was right that staff heard that debate as well as being able to take part in an internal consultation. Very recently, there was a discussion about maternity policy and the amount of statutory maternity pay paid to women opting for different periods of leave. Our debate brought out an aspect that required further officer work and clarification. We regularly consider publicly the numbers of staff employed from different minorities and the number of women employed, including at different grades, to see whether we are doing enough to assist different groups of staff to progress up the organisation. For instance, we have discussed the mechanisms to attract more candidates from certain communities, and I do not just mean ““the BME community”” as if it were one community, but all the communities within that. There have been tensions, and one would expect that, because of the number of staff employed and because what they do is a politically contentious matter. It seems to be the view that only the 12 mayoral appointments are sensitive appointments, and as regards who is appointed that may be so, but the number of points is an issue. Everything that the GLA does is politically an issue. I have never heard of a row over the number of security staff, but there could be one on political grounds, because the number of security staff engaged directly reflects the activity that the politicians carry out within the building, such as the number of events sponsored by the Mayor. For the first time last month the Assembly rejected or deferred a handful of proposed posts, but out of full-time equivalents totalling 42 and a half the rejections were seven and the deferrals, which were related to matters arising from the Bill—deferred until we see whether planning powers in particular are agreed, because there is no certainty that they will have an easy ride—were five; so there were seven and 5.5 out of 42.5. I can characterise the posts that were rejected as relating to mayoral promotion. The building was designed for 426 staff and is now carrying an establishment, not all of whom require desks, of about 770. My view is that this is not at all a straightforward matter for the head of paid service. Once the Mayor has got his budget, what is the head of paid service to do when presented with proposals for extra posts except, in a fairly gentle manner, to query whether the building can accommodate them and so on? The head of paid service cannot be as robust as is needed in that situation. That is mainly about the clause itself, but my Amendments Nos. 23 and 24 are specific safeguards which, if the clause remains, the Assembly considers should be applied. That is the unanimous view of the Assembly across all the political groups, and they speak for themselves. I believe that in practice a requirement for consultation would be carried out, but it would be appropriate for it to be in the Bill. There are then some procedural matters about notice to enable the Assembly to carry out its scrutiny role, a role that is different from this one. I appreciate that I have spoken in fairly robust terms, which is quite uncharacteristic of the way that staffing matters have been dealt with in what I will describe, having heard the term used of another Foster building, as ““up the Fosterista””. I beg to move.