Greater London Authority Bill

My Lords, I strongly support the amendment and am delighted that it has been brought back. We discussed it at some length in Committee but it needs to be considered on the Floor of the House and with as much openness as possible. To be fair, I think that the noble Lord, Lord Tope, has been mild in putting it forward. In reality, the Assembly’s scrutiny of and ability to affect the Mayor’s budget are a nonsense. The Assembly cannot stop anything that the Mayor wants to be done. It can make any observations that it likes but the Mayor does not have to pay the slightest attention to them; nor, indeed, is there any realistic mechanism whereby the Mayor can be suborned into paying attention to what the Assembly says. The Government set great store by the word ““scrutiny””, but scrutiny is a completely toothless tool. It involves only the power of persuasion. Persuasion may be possible if you are dealing with policies, strategies or something else that can be discussed, but in this case a budget is put before you; it represents the Mayor’s controls and supports his policies, but London pays for it and London is becoming very brassed off with the amount that it is having to pay. The Mayor’s budget has burgeoned since the GLA was formed. In fact, the call on the council tax payer has risen by well over 50 per cent, and I think that the figure would be well in excess of that if calculations were made based on the sums since the mayoralty was introduced. It seems to us that some mechanism for legitimate control needs to be advanced. The noble Lord, Lord Tope, is right when he says that there has to be a change in the balance between the Mayor knowing clearly that he will have no trouble at all in getting his budget through and his having a bit of a tangle over it and not being at all sure whether it will be accepted on the basis of what the Assembly believes to be appropriate and right for London’s electorate. We also have to remember that the Assembly, as well as the Mayor, is elected and is there to support the London electorate. We very much welcome the amendment and I strongly support it.