Communities and Local Government/Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

The hon. Gentleman is right. For that reason, the London government commission suggested in our final report that London borough councils should be given much stronger powers to scrutinise the work of the PCTs and acute trusts in their areas. Indeed, if we were sensible, we would look to remove the obstacles that currently prevent successfully performing London boroughs from taking on some of the commissioning role of the PCTs. That would make for a much better fit between the provider and democratic accountability. It is a shame that the Government are still too wedded to a single national template for the way in which the service is delivered. At the strategic and regional level, it seems right to give the Mayor of London greater input into the development of health policy. Having a health inequalities strategy is a step in the right direction, but I see no reason why the Mayor should not have a much closer involvement in the development of public health policy in London and the key appointments in the public health field. I do not see why the London assembly should not have a proper, statutory role in the scrutiny of the work of the strategic health authority in London. All those things would make good sense in the London governance context, but the Government have not gone that far. The obvious area where the Government have ducked an issue is in relation to the Government office for London. That has been referred to by my hon. Friends and I will not repeat their points. However, it seems peculiar that we have a situation in which the number of civil servants in GOL has risen since we have had a Greater London authority. By the time we have added up the numbers in GOL and the numbers that the Mayor has recruited, we have something like double the number of bureaucrats looking after London matters that we had before. That does not make sense. The missed opportunity has been to fail to take this chance to slim down GOL and transfer many of the programmes that it administers to the Mayor directly or to the functional bodies—in some cases to the police authority, in others to the London Development Agency, and in some cases even to the London boroughs themselves. To slim GOL down, it need not follow the same pattern as Government offices elsewhere in the country, because we have a different governance structure in London. That is a serious missed opportunity. The damage is that, to beef up the Mayor’s power, the Government compensate for that strategic failure, which would have represented proper devolution and proper localism, by seeking to suck up planning powers from the level of the London boroughs to the Mayor. That is not devolution or localism. It is a regional centralism, which is not good or healthy for democracy. The reasons given for that by the Mayor—we all understand why the Mayor seeks to push the envelope of his powers all the time—frankly do not stack up. As somebody who served as a member of the old Greater London council, albeit for a short while, I can say that my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, Central is right: tension between the GLC and the London boroughs was rife going back right to the beginning, because of the unsatisfactory overlap in relation to planning powers. That tension existed regardless of which party controlled the GLC or the boroughs. We are in danger of recreating that. It would be much more sensible to encourage the Mayor to work in much closer partnership with the boroughs, rather than tending to dictate to them. I have looked at some of the analysis of some of the key strategic planning issues that the Mayor says that he wants to be able to take on board. One problem is that the Mayor himself has not been the best advocate for increasing his powers, given the way in which he exercises some of them. On some of the strategic issues, he has adopted a capricious and, frequently, contradictory approach to different planning applications. I will give a couple of quick examples. The first relates to a mixed-use development in Kew Bridge road in Hounslow. The Mayor supported the development, but the borough council refused it. The Mayor supported the developers on appeal. The Secretary of State concluded that the borough was right to refuse the application. That was because the development was not a good design, it would harm a conservation area, a world heritage site and the setting of listed buildings, it would produce substandard units of accommodation, it would harm the living conditions of people nearby, and it conflicted not with only the borough’s unitary development plan, but the Mayor’s own London plan. The inspector found that the Mayor’s evidence was wrong on that last point. The Mayor maintained that the development supported his London plan; the inspector said that it did not. That does not give one much confidence in the Mayor’s planning powers. A similar example is a development in Hammersmith and Fulham, where, again, the Mayor supported a planning development that contravened two parts of his own London plan. The same happened in Greenwich, where the Mayor wanted a high-rise development that was adjacent to a world heritage site. Finally, in Southwark, the Mayor sought to oppose the London borough’s attempts to refuse a planning application, claiming that that would reduce not only the height of the building, which seems to be a bit of an obsession of his, but the number of units. In fact, the London borough of Southwark, left to its own devices, negotiated a scheme that produced more units than the Mayor’s would have done. The majority of those borough councils are Labour controlled, so I am not making a narrow partisan point. The fact is that the Mayor does not have a good track record on planning matters, which is why we have concerns and will want to return to the issue in the debate on the Bill. The final element that I want to touch on—time presses—relates to the other area where an opportunity has been missed. One point is the balance between central Government and GOL, the Mayor, and the boroughs. The other is the failure to address the balance between the Mayor and the assembly. The assembly has its own democratic legitimacy. It is elected by the same people as the Mayor on the same day. It has democratic rights too. There has been a failure to balance increased power going to the Mayor with the ability of the assembly to act as a proper check and balance. My hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, Central referred to the budget situation and I will not repeat what he said, but it is a key issue. I recently led a delegation from the commission on London governance to New York, where we able to see how these things work at first hand. What my hon. Friend said is right. The city council in New York has considerably greater power in relation to the mayor of New York than the London assembly has in relation to the Mayor of London. Not only does the city council have the power to overturn the budget by a simple majority, it also has legislative power. The mayor’s strategies—to use the equivalent London word—in New York require a vote in their favour by the city council. We do not have that in London. Those are significant powers, but they have never prevented New York from being regarded as a strong mayor model. It is sometimes argued that giving more power to the assembly would weaken the strong mayor model. The New York example clearly demonstrates that not to be the case. Neither Rudolph Giuliani, nor Michael Bloomberg have had any difficulty in getting their policies through and being strong mayors, despite the fact that, not only did they have that considerable power of the city council to deal with, but the city council was always dominated overwhelmingly by the opposing party. Giving the assembly more power is not a recipe for gridlock. I know that that is the propaganda that the Mayor of London puts out, but I hope that the Government will not buy that line when it comes to the detail of the legislation. A key point that we need to look at is the mayoral strategies. The budget has been discussed. I am glad that the Government are proposing to strengthen the requirement for the Mayor to consult the assembly on his strategies and to give reasons where he differs, but they ought to go further. They should require the mayoral strategies to be approved by a vote in the assembly or, at the very least, they should give the assembly the power to amend the strategies in the same way as it can amend the budget. We can argue about the thresholds and so on, but the principle ought to be that, if the Mayor’s supply can be amended, why on earth can the strategies that give rise to the demands on his supply not be amended as well? That was considered and, at one point, before the legislation came into force, it was the Government’s intention. In 1998, on Second Reading of the Greater London Authority Bill, the Deputy Prime Minister said:"““The assembly’s scrutiny role underlies all its work: it will be consulted on all strategies, and have the power to propose amendments””.—[Official Report, 14 December 1998; Vol. 322, c. 627.]" It is a shame that that got lost somewhere in the subsequent passage of the Bill. It is not often that I say that the Deputy Prime Minister was right, but he was on that occasion. The subsequent climbdown—how and why it happened I know not—was a mistake. I hope that the Government will take the opportunity to go back to their original 1998 thinking and give the assembly the power to amend mayoral strategies. That would concentrate the mayor’s mind and significantly improve democratic accountability in London, which we all want. The mayor eventually gave way and allowed planning decisions to be taken in public, but that happened only because of the pressure exerted by the assembly and its committees over six years. That proves that rigorous and powerful scrutiny improves decision making, rather than hindering it, and that is also true of Select Committees in the House. I hope that the Government will take that message on board and that the detail of the legislation will reflect it, because there is still an opportunity to improve the proposals on London’s governance and to make the settlement work better.