Greater London Authority Bill

I am grateful to noble Lords who have spoken in this short debate, and to my noble friends in particular for picking up on two points that I would respond to. Nothing separates the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, and me on the need for council tax payers in London to understand who they are paying their council tax to, and what they are getting for it. That is absolutely no problem. Our problem with the amendment is that it does not aid transparency, but will add to costs without helping the council tax payer to understand what she or he is getting for their money any more clearly. Nor am I convinced that the specific arrangements for the GLA, alone among precepting authorities, need to be changed in the way the amendment proposes. As we all know, the existing arrangements for the major precepting authorities are that the billing authority collects the tax on behalf of the precepting authority as part of its own billing process. In my own experience, this is generally effective and efficient. While I have no problem with the principle of the amendment, we have an issue with placing an additional requirement on the GLA to print its own bill and explanatory notes solely dedicated to the GLA precept. It would be costly and additionally confusing for council tax payers. Like my noble friend Lord Harris, I do not think that it adds value. On transparency, to pick up the point of my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours, the billing authorities in London already have to highlight the level of GLA precept for a household on the face of their council tax bill. In addition, there is a statutory requirement for information about the GLA’s budget, expenditure and the impact of changes on the amount of council tax to be included in the explanatory material that accompanies bills. My noble friend Lord Harris alluded to the amount of stuff that comes through the door. In that envelope from my local council—mine is Lambeth—I am grateful to have that information, clearly spelling out what the precept is going to. There is growing awareness of the GLA’s contribution to council tax bills in London, driven, in part, by the Olympics. As the GLA continues to mature, I am sure that Londoners will become increasingly aware of it. I should also say that the increases in precepts have been largely driven by increases in policing and the number of police in neighbourhood police teams, and we are very grateful for that. So I am not sure that a requirement on the GLA to print its own bill and explanatory notices for each of the 3 million eligible households in London would make much difference to the council tax payer’s understanding. I suspect that it might even have the opposite effect. Having received such a bill, council tax payers might assume that the GLA would be directly collecting the precept from them rather than through their borough. There is potential for confusion, which certainly would not aid transparency. I am certain that this would be a costly process because the new requirement would impose a burden on both the GLA and the boroughs as both would need to co-operate with each other on the separate billing arrangements. That would be bound to be at the expense of front-line services, which I am sure would not go down well with London council tax payers. In a climate where we all want to see public sector administration costs kept to a minimum—the party opposite is well known for wanting that—to allow more resources to move from front-line services to administrative services is not good news. I am not convinced that requiring the GLA to produce its own billing notice would be the best use of resources. The GLA estimates that rebilling all London households would cost £10 million a year. That does not seem to be a million miles away from what it would have to do if it followed these procedures. Ten million pounds a year could provide a lot of services for London council tax payers. For those reasons, I believe that it would be best to continue with the system that we have—it is well-established, generally efficient, well understood and is becoming better understood—where the borough bills and collects the GLA precept on behalf of the GLA as part of its own council tax billing notice. I hope that on those grounds the noble Baroness will feel able to withdraw the amendment.