Greater London Authority Bill

My Lords, it is always interesting in debates such as this, where the enormous difference in views goes along the political spectrum, to imagine how noble Lords would feel if—as I am sure will not happen—one day we had a Tory Government and maybe most boroughs controlled by the Liberal Democrats and Labour. I wonder whether some noble Lords’ views on this would be any different in those circumstances. The amendment is a kind of compromise longstop if the board that we discussed on the previous amendment fails to achieve its objective. It is a good longstop, because it would take several years before we got around to introducing primary legislation to bring in a clause such as this one and, in the interim, the waste disposal process could have gone seriously wrong. I do not accept that London is any different from any other major conurbation, except that it is broken up into boroughs. There are big blocks of flats in many parts of this country. There is still a need to persuade people to sort out their rubbish and do the things that we talked about before. It would be extremely useful to have this clause, or an amended version of it, in the Bill as an adjunct to the board that we discussed earlier.