Greater London Authority Bill

My Lords, 1,000 people in a firm in the City got a bonus of £1 million last Christmas. That sits pretty badly with the people who are badly housed or living in temporary accommodation. Therefore, it is welcome that the mayor together with the GLA want to increase housing provision for poor families in the capital. As I understand it, the mayor’s target is 30,000 new homes per annum, which on the face of it seems quite modest. Of those, one-half should be affordable homes and 10,000 should be in the socially rented sector, the rest of affordable homes being for shared ownership. That, although those are modest figures, would I understand make an appreciable difference to helping poor people in London who are at the moment badly housed. Some of the boroughs are less interested in social housing than others, while some of them have an excellent record. For the sake of all Londoners—and even the most affluent boroughs have poor people living in them who are badly housed—it is right that there should be an overall strategy and ability to deliver housing for London. I believe that this Bill will enable the mayor with the new powers to do far more for the badly housed people of London. On planning, I welcome giving the mayor enhanced powers for what will be a small number of strategic planning decisions. Everything points to the fact that these will simply be decisions that are very significant and whose importance transcends the individual boroughs in which the sites are located. Provided that there is no bureaucracy of having to jump over two hurdles for planning permission and that there is proper transparency in the process of deciding on planning applications, that is probably a good thing. If it means that the mayor will have more influence on bringing forward land for affordable housing, that is so much the better. Of course, we all have our individual concerns, and I shall indulge myself in talking about one of them. There may be particular sites about which one might be anxious. In my former parliamentary constituency of Battersea, there is the whole future of Battersea power station to think about. This is not an occasion to debate this in detail, but it is an important site, and I sincerely hope that a proper use will be found for this iconic building under its new owners, possibly including the Government’s proposed energy technologies institute. I understand that that has the full support of the mayor. I hope that the Minister will think about that one and see whether there is anything that can be done. Of course, the power station is much too large simply to house the energy technologies institute, but it could be a useful site for it and other uses would follow. I turn to what is probably the key question that bothers me—that of waste. It is a key environmental issue that presents enormous challenges to the country as a whole and to local authorities that have responsibilities. For government, there is the need to take action to reduce the total amount of waste produced. One only has to buy things in some stores to see how much waste there is in the packaging, material and so on. It is important that that should be reduced. Having got that down—and there is some way to go yet—the real challenges are to increase the amount of waste recycled and reduce the amount going into landfill, as there will soon not be enough landfill in southern England to accommodate the waste from Londoners. Bluntly, London is simply not doing well enough in dealing with waste. Some of the individual boroughs are; some are not. Let me give some figures. In 2005—the latest year for which I could get figures—London recycled 21 per cent of its household waste. This compares with 57 per cent in Hamburg, 43 per cent in Munich, 39 per cent in Milan and 39 per cent in Vienna. In North America, San Francisco recycled half its household waste and Seattle 58 per cent. These figures make London look as if it is not doing well enough. Other cities in the world may be doing worse than London but we ought to be doing better. We are conscious of the need to do something and understand what should be done but we are simply not doing it. The national target for the UK is 25 per cent so we have some way to go. But the situation is even worse: 22 out of London’s 37 waste authorities, which may comprise individual boroughs or several boroughs acting together, failed to achieve their statutory household recycling targets for 2005-06. London boroughs and London waste authorities are among the lowest ranking of all English local authorities, and the majority have not met their statutory recycling targets. London is currently the worst performing English region for recycling: 22 out of the 37 waste authorities are in the bottom half in terms of performance and 18 are in the bottom quartile. Only one, Bexley, is in the upper quartile. That is a pretty poor record. Of the 15 London waste authorities that responded to a Government survey, only one was planning to meet its 2020 recycling target. About two-thirds of London’s waste is buried in landfill and mostly exported to sites outside London; the latter is a fairly random process. London incinerates 18 per cent of its waste and this is set to double. London will then account for half of England’s share of incineration while managing only 15 per cent of the country’s municipal waste. That is not good enough. London is the only major metropolitan region where waste disposal is not managed and co-ordinated at city level. So far as I have discovered, pretty well every major metropolitan region in the world has a co-ordinated overall strategy for waste disposal. Of course, the boroughs will still have to collect the waste but essentially we need a waste disposal strategy for the whole of London. Individual boroughs have lobbied against that. They want to keep things as they are and say that they can do better. However, I am not sure that they have demonstrated that up to now. The Bill is weak in this respect. It is going in the right direction but it could be strengthened. A vast incinerator is proposed in Belvedere for west London authorities to send their waste to. People in Belvedere do not want an incinerator there and I understand that the Mayor of London does not see that as the best way forward. That is just a one-off example. What is the answer? It is a single waste disposal authority, which would achieve the right balance between local collection and strategic processing and disposal. A strategic waste disposal authority should be a body of the GLA clearly accountable to the Mayor. At present accountability for waste disposal is unclear and some of the joint waste disposal authorities are hardly accountable; they operate much more like quangos. By moving this function under the Mayor we would improve accountability, not lessen it. We would also achieve better co-ordination and promote proper investment in the recycling facilities that are necessary to improve London’s record in that regard. Such an authority would also improve the transport of waste around London. Transport for London estimates that within London alone waste travels 44 million kilometres a year, accounts for 10 per cent of all freight movements in London and represents 290,000 tonnes of CO2—this at a time when we are supposed to be more environmentally conscious. If we had a strategic waste disposal authority for London, the transport of waste in London could be lessened. It cannot be abolished altogether and reduced to nothing, but it could certainly be lessened from the present figure, where individual waste authorities make their own decisions, search for sites where they can dispose of waste or occasionally recycle it. We can do better. Having thought hard about the counter suggestions from the London boroughs, I believe sincerely that a properly accountable strategic waste disposal authority for London under the Mayor is the right way forward. I hope that the Government will give it serious consideration as we proceed with the next stages of the Bill.