Clause 12
Greater London Authority Bill
4:00 pm
Jim Fitzpatrick (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department of Trade and Industry; Poplar and Canning Town, Labour)
The clause amends section 85 of the 1999 Act to provide for separate component budget requirements for the Mayor and assembly. The GLA is a major precepting authority, and requires each London borough council to raise a certain amount annually from London council tax payers in its area to help fund GLA services. The 1999 Act sets out rules which the authority must follow in calculating its consolidated budget requirement which, in turn, allows the GLA to calculate the basic amount of its council tax—its precept. The GLA’s consolidated budget requirement is made up of the aggregate of the component budget requirements for the GLA itself and each of the four functional bodies.
The clause provides that, instead of a single GLA component budget requirement, there will be separate component budget requirements for the Mayor and the assembly. The assembly’s component budget requirement is the requirement in relation to the assembly’s functions: estimates of expenditure, allowances for contingencies and use of reserves in respect of assembly members and staff, goods and services procured solely for the purposes of the assembly, and the London transport users committee, known as London TravelWatch.
The Mayor’s component budget requirement is everything that would otherwise make up the authority’s component budget requirement. The clause provides for a transparent and discrete budget for the assembly’s functions within the existing structures of the budget-setting process. It gives London council tax payers a transparent statement of the cost of delivering the assembly’s functions and it offers the assembly the reassurance of having its own budget separate from that of the Mayor.