Greater London Authority Bill

The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, was kind enough to introduce me back into the debate for the remarks I made yesterday. I do not propose to detain the Committee for more than a moment, but if we are to have this ping-pong, it seems appropriate that it should be two-sided rather than one. The noble Lord was my constituent—indeed, an excellent one—and I am delighted to say that he continues to take an interest in the affairs of Westminster. I declare retrospectively an interest of long ago. I made myself extremely unpopular with my constituents in the summer of 1978 when I was serving on the Finance Bill. An amendment was tabled proposing that Arabs should not be allowed to buy houses in London; and, notably, that they should not be allowed to buy them in the centre of London. As a Back-Bench Member of the Committee, I argued that that was wholly wrong; that we had always run a maritime and open society and that we were in danger of being retaliated against if we did not allow others to trade in this country—or, indeed, to live here—though they had the right to do so. I am conscious that in not supporting that Back-Bench amendment in 1978 I may be in some small part responsible for the upsurge in London house prices 30 years later. The point has been made, rightly, that we should not in this Bill legislate for a particular man or for a particular council. We should be producing legislation that can be understood and interpreted, and followed and used, by all the councils in the land. I am in no sense being defensive about the issue. As I said yesterday, I have no brief from Westminster City Council and I hold no brief for it. It must resolve the dilemmas of running its planning policy in a central London area where Russians and Arabs appear to wish to live in significant quantities, and it has to cope with that as best it can. Perhaps I may say in defence of the Government that they have seen fit to knight the leader of Westminster City Council, which an unusual decision by any Government in the context of a local government leader of a party other than their own. Westminster has consistently been among the 24 best administered local authorities in the country under the Audit Commission.