Greater London Authority Bill

While supporting the general principle of Amendment No. 94, perhaps for any future amendments I may ask the noble Baroness to remember the London-wide members of the planning authority. Paragraph (c) refers only to constituency members, which is a detail on the principle. The noble Baroness made some very important points and makes the correct distinction between hearing representations and the process of arriving at the decision, which is behind much of what she said. The hearing of representations process should be open to the public. Webcasts, new technology and so on is not the same as articulating in public how one arrives at a decision. It is precisely because of the ““Here is what I decided in the shower this morning”” scenario that the processes are really important and need to be explicit. The noble Baroness also raised the important matter of a code of conduct. There is a lot of interest in how the Mayor will deal with applications in particular from functional bodies, which, as it were, are his own creatures. Local authorities have processes for dealing with their own applications. I believe that the Government share the view that the Mayor should not take over applications on which he has made a public statement, which he might have done as chair of a functional body, or about any application. I hope that the Minister will confirm that and will explain what would happen not just if the mayor takes over the application, but also where he retains a power to direct refusal, because, although the issue might not be quite as sharp, it exists. I have heard the comment that it will be interesting to see whether any mayor—I am personalising this, but it could probably apply to any person—or his or her advisers would be able to resist commenting on particularly interesting applications. I am not aware of a mechanism to prevent a mayor taking over an application when his or her office has commented and who would police this. Perhaps the Minister can assist us. As we are all aware, the difficulty is that the holder of the office of Mayor of London does not have another politician to whom to delegate a planning decision if the Deputy Mayor is caught up in a debate. We are in the odd situation in which the current Mayor delegates to the Chief Executive of the Greater London Authority decisions on applications for the Olympic Games sites. I would be interested to hear from the Government what ought to happen when a Mayor is ““conflicted out””.