My Lords, in intervening briefly, I make it clear that I am a passionate supporter of the whole mayoral principle. I believe in elected mayors and have done from the very beginning. I saw them in France when I lived there many years ago. I believe that the system works and it is better than other models, so I have no problem with it at all. However, I also support my noble friend’s amendments.
It is more than 40 years since I was in local government but I always felt that very often local government becomes lazy. People do not always get into that position—there are often very good mayors outside the mayoral model that we are discussing, and leaders of local authorities can be there for years doing a perfectly good job—but you often find in local authorities that people simply become lazy, and they should be moved on. However, they have such control over what is going on around them in the local authority that they cannot be moved. The people whom they have appointed are somehow compromised, and they spend more time ensuring that their position is safe than in engaging themselves in the innovation that was talked about by a number of those who contributed to the last debate.
I think that a term of eight years is quite sufficient. It would keep the mayor on his or her toes, and they would want to be seen to be innovative at every stage. In many ways, I think it would avoid the kind of problems that I have heard and read about over recent years when I have looked at what happened in some of the mayoralties. The recent problems in east London in many ways reflect what I am saying: someone had total control and now, fortunately—through the courts, in the end—we have managed to get rid of them. If you have a model that is based on a more limited term, there is less opportunity for those sorts of problems to arise.