My Lords, this is my first intervention on the Bill. I apologise for that. Looking around the Chamber, I think that I am the only veteran of the Committee stage of the Greater London Authority Bill in the other place. We assembled a Committee of 29, 27 of whom were London Members—I will come back to that in a moment.
My late noble kinsman was not only a Minister of Housing and Local Government for four years—what would now be Secretary of State for the Environment—but a close friend of the late Lord Maude, to whom others have alluded in this debate. In so far as we are obliged to indicate our credentials in an instance such as this, I will simply confess that I served for 18 months on Camden Council at a time when 18 months on Camden Council seemed like 18 years. I therefore regard it as being a reasonable credential. Until I was 72 years of age, I had had a London address the whole of my life.
The Greater London Authority Bill Committee, which is analogous to what we are engaged in today, had 20 Labour Members on it, seven Conservatives and two Liberal Democrats. I bring them in because it was the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, who introduced this amendment. Both of the two Liberal Democrats who served on that lengthy Committee also served in the recent coalition. They served with distinction on the original Bill. As I said, only two of the 29 were not London Members.
One of the consequences of that was that it was an extremely well-informed Committee, and a Bill which arrived with us with only about 270 clauses ended up having nearer 430. To go back to remarks that my noble friend Lord Heseltine made much earlier this afternoon, that occurred because Whitehall did not really know as much about London as the people who were elected Members in London. We London Members introduced a great deal of totally relevant material into the Bill, and I have no doubt at all that we greatly improved it in the process. It had more than 400 clauses by the time it came out of the House of Lords because, although in Committee in the House of Commons officials were saying to Ministers, “Minister, you must resist this amendment”, the amendments which were sensibly introduced in the House of Commons were then picked up in the House of Lords. As a result, we ended up with a Bill with more than 400 clauses. I have no doubt at all that the Bill was greatly improved in that process, but it did take time. I would not begrudge time on this particular subject, so important is it.
I am not sure whether I have helped in any way either side of the argument with my comments, but I agree with my noble friend Lord Heseltine that this is a spectacular opportunity and I hope we can collectively seize it.