Greater London Authority Bill

Perhaps we made a mistake in including in this group the Question whether Clause 26 shall stand part of the Bill, because we are obviously not opposed to people getting due recompense for their work. If we come back to this matter, we shall not talk about Clause 26 but about the other two clauses. We have had an interesting debate. The noble Lord, Lord Tope, asked: if it ain’t broke, why fix it? That is the general message. This has worked well in London. If Londoners and all three political parties accept it, why do we want to change it? If we want the body to include extra representatives from the business world or elsewhere, I do not understand why they could not be additional to the existing representation. Why do we have to reduce the number of democratically elected people? I am all for increasing the number of democratically elected people on bodies such as health authorities, police authorities, fire authorities or whatever, though in the past few years all Governments have been reducing that number. I strongly oppose removing elected people and introducing others. I agree with having other representatives but, I repeat, they should be added to the existing members. Representatives from business or ethnic minority groups could be added. Therefore, we continue to oppose Clause 25. I am concerned by the operational part of Clause 27. I have just said that I agree with bodies having elected membership but I do not think that politicians should be involved in firefighting. That would be a big mistake. Again referring to my own experience, at one stage we decided that we would have more women in the fire authority. We set a target percentage but the required number could not be recruited, so we did not have as many firefighters as we wanted. You cannot interfere with that and operational matters such as moving fire engines around London for political reasons, so I very much oppose the Mayor having any operational input to the London fire authority. Having said that, I shall not press my opposition to the clause today but we will return to Clauses 25 and 27. Clause 25 agreed to. Clauses 26 and 27 agreed to.