My Lords, I would have sympathy with my noble friend Lord Grocott if the mayor were able to act in an untrammelled way. Coming back to the reality of the Bill rather than grand constitutional fears about what might happen if circumstances took a different course, new Section 107C says:
“The mayor for the area of a combined authority must appoint one of the members of the authority to be the mayor’s deputy”.
In fact, the choice of deputy is very severely constrained. The deputy must be a member of the combined authority, which will limit the choice to a small number of people.
The issue before us is not a great constitutional principle of whether the choice of deputy should be constrained in a way that acknowledges the representative credentials of the combined authority—it is so constrained under the Bill—but whether there should be a further process, as proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, of consent by the scrutiny committee to the choice of one of those members as deputy. This is a practical issue, in my view, not a constitutional issue. The practical issue is that it is important that the mayor, who comes with a mandate, appoints a deputy with whom he or she gets on.
Those of us who have been engaged in these relationships all know that in practice a deputy mayor will not be appointed who significantly constrains the authority of the mayor, because the mayor is sitting there with a large mandate. There are checks and balances. The combined authority has significant powers to constrain the mayor and to agree the mayor’s actions. If the mayor does not get on with or have confidence in the deputy, what will happen in practice is that the mayor will rely on advisers rather than the deputy mayor. That is not a healthy state of affairs. The mayor has a mandate. The mayor is constrained in the choice of deputy to appoint only a member of the combined authority. It seems a constraint too far to require that choice to be agreed by the scrutiny committee. Of course, in the nature of the political relationship between the mayor and the scrutiny committee, the scrutiny committee itself may well be fairly hostile to the mayor. It is perfectly possible that that will be the position that the scrutiny committee takes.