Greater London Authority Bill

I shall do my best to distinguish between principle and detail because there are issues relating to both. The debate on this amendment is very similar to the discussion that we had on the two-term limit. Again, we can look at the American parallel but we should do so with a very large dose of salt. In some ways, I think that it is rather dangerous to make such parallels. It is important that democratic legitimacy is built into the Mayor’s role and position, which ultimately derive from direct elections, and we should not do anything to dilute that. Indeed, his success in these elections, involving the whole London electorate, gives him his strong democratic mandate. We would be very unhappy about allowing a Mayor to be removed from office through a petition, as that would obviously undermine that principle. The noble Baroness asked what could be done: she suggested that it should be possible to do something in situations of extremis between elections. Section 21 of the Greater London Authority Act provides for that. It states that a mayor can be disqualified if he is bankrupt, convicted of a criminal offence with imprisonment of not less than three months or disqualified for misconduct. Those are very powerful restraints on a mayor. However, being able to get rid of a mayor by a petition—particularly, as noble Lords have pointed out, through the action of such a small proportion of Londoners who are unhappy with him—would introduce enormous risk into the whole process. Perhaps I may elucidate the figures that have been mentioned. The default threshold for the proposed petition is 10 per cent of the number of electors who voted for the Mayor. That is hardly a high hurdle: it would be 83,000 electors, based on the 2004 election results, out of a London electorate of 5.2 million. That figure stands comparison with the more than 90,000 Londoners who voted for the BNP in the last Assembly elections, so it is conceivable that a Mayor could be removed by extremists if the default threshold were adopted. This would be a dangerous precedent in terms of special interest groups, which, I believe, would campaign almost immediately to remove the Mayor through continuous petitions whenever they disagreed with a specific policy. The other problem, alluded to by my noble friend, is that a mayor removed from office would be able to stand again at a subsequent ballot, so there would be a continuous revolving door—a time-consuming cycle of petition, by-election and petition—which could turn the whole thing into a farce. Finally, I am slightly surprised that the Opposition want the Secretary of State to determine the exact arrangements for a petition. That would give us the worst of all worlds, with a very low threshold and serious powers given to the Secretary of State to determine the process. I cannot believe that the noble Baroness wants such a strong lever over the Mayor, especially when the Government and the Mayor could be of different political persuasions. Clearly, a whole range of dangers is involved. This has been an important debate in terms of checks and balances, but we cannot accept the amendment and I hope that the noble Baroness will feel able to withdraw it.