Clause 7
Greater London Authority Bill
12:00 pm
Michael Gove (Shadow Minister (Housing), Communities and Local Government; Surrey Heath, Conservative)
I support the principle and detail of the amendments standing in the name of the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington. After the briefest of estrangements over this debate, I am happy that we are once more reunited. It is wonderful to have the warm embrace of the Liberal Democrats once more restored. I will make no comment about the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Lembit Öpik), or about the Liberal Democrats leaving and then re-embracing other individuals.
As to the matter under debate, the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington pointed out that the current arrangement works well. It has the merit of ensuring that the assembly has an important role to play in staff appointments. It is important to clear up any concerns that some may have. It is not the case that the assembly is responsible for the meanest and lowliest staff appointment, as some may think. The assembly is not responsible for every discharge of executive function but, crucially, it determines the overall staff complement and has a key role in certain important staff appointments. It is important to appreciate why this system, which I accept is distinctive and not replicated in any other part of local government, has worked well so far. That is because it ensures that debates about staffing can occur transparently and openly, by operating across parties.
One concern that many people had about the mayoral system, and the idea of an executive Mayor, was its departure from existing local government practice in England and Wales. There was concern that we would see municipal Bonapartism—that rather than a Napoleon of Notting Hill, there would be a Napoleon for the whole of London—and that questions of staffing, the discharge of executive functions and policy would be decided by the Mayor and his kitchen cabinet without appropriate openness or transparency.
The Liberal Democrats and I, and my Back-Bench colleagues, have been trying—and will try during the progress on the Bill—to bring those decisions into the light wherever possible, whether on planning, housing or any other area, to ensure that there is maximum transparency and accountability. One good thing about this legislation which the Government originally brought forward in their first term was that there was already greater transparency and accountability about the creation of the staff complement. Because it was the assembly that debated and fixed those matters, it was not simply the case that the Mayor, in the privacy of his own kitchen cabinet, could take his decisions; we could have extensive public scrutiny of them. As a result of that, there is general agreement that the system has worked well. What we are likely to see here is a departure from a system that is transparent and open and works well to a system that will favour the Mayor and limit the degree of transparency and openness.
It might be argued that the new system is closer to local government practice and to the principle that a chief executive should be responsible for appointing staff. In fact, it marks a departure away from a welcome precedent that the Government established in the original legislation. One of the things that it is important to recognise is that the Mayor of London occupies a distinctive position in the whole system of governance that we have in the UK. We do not have any other analogous individual who exercises such a degree of power. To try to say that the Mayor should have all the benefits but none of the constraints that apply in local government elsewhere is to shift the balance in a way that we consider to be unfortunate.
I know that some people will say that all that is proposed is that a bureaucrat—an enlightened bureaucrat at that, a head of paid service—is responsible for discharging those functions. However, that individual will find that he or she comes more under the sway of the Mayor and the Mayor’s private office, and is less directly accountable to the assembly than is the case at the moment. Given the way that the Government seek to try to remove transparency and accountability from the current process of setting the staff complement, we believe that the Liberal Democrat amendments, by seeking to preserve the existing system, strike a blow for greater accountability, which should be at the heart of every measure within the Bill. We are therefore more than happy to support the amendments that stand in the name of the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington.