Greater London Authority Bill

As I tried to explain to the House, and as the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr. Field) has just urged, there is a democratic safeguard in the current arrangements. It is in the original 1999 Act and has worked well to date. The Lords amendment would undermine, not reinforce, that. In his comments about New York, the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), speaking from the Conservative Front Bench, illustrated why it is not possible to translate the models of other cities to our circumstances, and why it is important that we continue to fashion the arrangements that are appropriate for our political tradition and our capital city. He cites New York and the budget-making process there, but he knows that there are almost three times as many members of the New York city council. He knows, because he has discussed the matter before with my hon. Friend, that those members have only a local mandate and that generally, when they seek to challenge the mayor of New York's budget, they do so because they are pursuing support for local issues—precisely the sort of risk of pork-barrel politics that the hon. Gentleman is so keen to avoid.