Greater London Authority Bill

I want to speak briefly in support of this amendment. I say ““briefly”” because, as the Committee will be pleased to hear, I suspect that my voice will not hold up for too long. My noble friends Lord Whitty and Lord Harris of Haringey put the case clearly and fairly, and the international comparisons are very telling. We must hold on to the fact that London is going in the wrong direction in this area. It is not yet going in the right direction. It is certainly not going in the right direction at the pace that is needed to deal with the problems that it faces today, tomorrow and the day after. At Second Reading I raised my concerns about the performance of the London boroughs on waste management. Fairly predictably, this irritated a number of the London boroughs, including Southwark where I live. I am not altogether sure whether my bins will still be collected. Predictably, Southwark sent a great deal of material explaining what it is doing and describing the new facilities that it is putting in place. That is all very admirable and I have no quarrel whatever with it. However, much of the material which has been sent to me does not look very strategic but, rather, a late-in-the-day response to an impending set of deadlines and targets triggered by the 2010 target and deadline. Like my noble friend Lord Whitty, I suggest that target is likely to be missed anyway. We have to keep our eye on the longer-term targets and on whether we will attain them if we carry on with the present arrangements. I received a letter from my noble friend Lady Andrews following my intervention at Second Reading arguing against the Mayor’s proposals for a London-wide body. Although my noble friend’s letter was, as usual, extremely eloquent, it did not really provide the figures or the cost-benefit analysis which I sought at Second Reading in order to assess whether the Mayor’s proposal was right or wrong. This is not about a power struggle. Rather, I seek an analysis of the options against risk, which we do not have. We have costings on a particular set of assumptions about a particular proposal but we do not have a cost-benefit risk analysis which shows that a pan-London body would be wrong given what has to be achieved in London in the longer term. Strangely, I also received a letter from London Councils on 3 May, which argued for leaving things with the borough. It had a rather strange concluding paragraph, including: "““We see the Government’s proposal for a London Waste and Recycling Fund as the opportunity to address the need for a new waste disposal infrastructure in London on a strategic basis””." I suggest that this is hardly a vote of confidence in the present arrangements, and rather a strange way of trying to justify them. It suggests, if they mean what they say, that there is some degree of doubt among the London boroughs over the strategic capability to cope with the present waste disposal. What they see as a sound strategic infrastructure to cope with the challenges of waste management in London is not clear to me. They seem to come quite close to supporting the Mayor’s analysis. The difference seems to be one of scale and timing. Like my noble friends, I am quite unpersuaded that the current mish-mash of 16 separate bodies and consortia is the right strategic approach for London. That is an average of two boroughs joining together to let quite complex contracts. We have been through this in other parts of the public services, where bodies too small to drive big, powerful contracts with powerful suppliers of services simply cannot do the best, most strategic deals. We must look at whether that is a sound way for us to proceed. I wish to correct the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham. As I heard her, she said that all the boroughs are in consortia. That is simply untrue: some of them are acting on a single-borough basis. I agree with her that the single body should be costed, but so also should the present mish-mash of bodies. They should be compared against the challenge London faces, and a risk analysis should be done. We need some assurance that there is a costed set of proposals to ensure that the current mish-mash will deliver the bacon on the challenges facing London. I have not seen those figures or analysis, so I remain unconvinced that we are heading in the right direction on this. The amendment of my noble friend Lord Whitty, supported by other noble Lords, hardly seems rash. In moving the amendment, my noble friend has already said that one can look at some of the detail, which I support. One understands that one does not wish to disrupt the current patterns of work. Clearly, there must be proper transitional arrangements in moving from what we have now to a new body, but that is what good public management is about when moving from one system to another. If that is the right approach to meet the challenges that London faces, as it seems to be, it is not an argument against moving in the direction that the amendment suggests. To sum up: given all the risks attached—which have been well set out—we have not seen the kind of analysis which supports carrying on with the present consortia. It looks like people slightly deluding themselves about the challenges that London faces and hoping that it will all be all right on the night as we bumble along with what can be described only as a mish-mash of bodies and consortia. They are really are a bit of a disgrace for a major capital city.