Greater London Authority Bill

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for her helpful advice on how the Assembly should approach the budget. I hope that she will forgive me if I suggest that she has not actually sat through the budget process at the Assembly—nor, I suspect, have any of the people advising her—whereas the movers of the amendment have had the good fortune to sit through seven Assembly mayoral budget processes. With the greatest respect, I suggest that there is a difference between theory and practice. Maybe the theory is well understood by the Minister and her advisers, but perhaps the practice is better understood by my noble colleague—who has chaired the Assembly and the budget committee, one or the other, continuously throughout the past seven years—and, dare I say, even by me. For the benefit of the noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton, I declared my membership of the Metropolitan Police Authority, although I did not tell him that for the past seven years I have chaired the finance committee and so have a little understanding of that, too. I know that my noble friend and I would be very pleased to debate at great length the budget process of the Greater London Authority, but we are not going to. We are talking about an important point of principle. We are all agreed that there is nothing more important than the budget. I am quite certain that the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the other place would love to be able to get his Budget through each year with only one-third of the votes in the House of Commons. My message to him would be, ““Dream on””. We must live with the nightmare. This is an important principle. The Mayor’s budget should be agreed by a simple majority of the Assembly, and I wish to test the opinion of the House. On Question, Whether the said amendment (No. 21) shall be agreed to? Their Lordships divided: Contents, 115; Not-Contents, 108.