Greater London Authority Bill

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. Of course, there are many examples across the country of those in coalition local authorities working well together. However, there are other examples of where such arrangements have not worked well and where the situation is much more unstable—not least, obviously, where elections take place annually, rather than every four years. As someone who lives in the city of Westminster—as other hon. Members do, and the hon. Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck) is here—I know that we council tax payers in Westminster now find the more than half of our council tax is due to the mayoral precept. Yet the Mayor is responsible for cleaning not a single street, emptying not a single bin or running not a single school or social services department. That enormous amount of money is spent in what we regard to a large extent as a fairly unaccountable way, because of the nature in which the system works for the GLA. That is the reason why we would like a simple two-thirds majority to be used, and I hope that that case was made very powerfully by my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill). The Government are almost trying to get a double lock. Of course, the whole system for the GLA was set up to ensure that there was not a single majority party. My own party won nine of the 14 first-past-the-post seats at the last GLA elections and the Labour party won five seats at that juncture, compared to eight and six in the first elections in 2000. As a result, a lock was put in place, with 11 of the members being on a top-up proportional representation basis from the Liberal Democrats, the Green party and UKIP or Veritas. The lock was designed to ensure that no party had a majority, yet the two-thirds arrangements make it almost impossible for a sensible discussion to take place with any Mayor who digs his heels in on budgetary matters. Given the arrangements for proportional representation in the GLA, a simple majority would be a sensible way forward. That would not necessarily lead to deadlock. Inevitably it would require a Mayor to slash certain aspects of his budget, but that would be done through the usual negotiations in politics. That would be an acceptable way forward for the people of London. The biggest concern of many of my constituents is the budgetary considerations of the mayoralty, which are getting out of control. It would be undesirable for more than half the council tax of other London boroughs to be in the hands of a largely unaccountable GLA and mayoralty. We want to consider other issues related to the powers of the mayoralty, which we discussed earlier. We hope the Government will ensure that there is a proper democratic safeguard for budgetary arrangements in the GLA.