Clause 18
Greater London Authority Bill
9:30 am
Michael Gove (Shadow Minister (Housing), Communities and Local Government; Surrey Heath, Conservative)
I welcome you to the Chair, Lady Winterton. The Minister was chivalrous enough to mention that, when the Committee first met, I was indebted to Mr. O’Hara for his kindness in guiding me through this part of the legislative process. As you may be aware, this is the first significant Public Bill Committee on which I have served and, by chance, I find myself serving on the Front Bench, so the potential for me to make mistakes is altogether magnified. [Hon. Members: “No.”] I meant mistakes of procedure. I am of course supported by my hon. Friends, to ensure that I get everything right on policy, but if I make mistakes of procedure, I hope that you will treat me gently and guide me back on to the straight and narrow path, Lady Winterton.
I should also like to thank you, Lady Winterton, and the usual channels for consenting to allow the Committee’s proceedings to start at 9.30 this morning, rather than at 9 am. Given the exigencies of travelling through London on a busy Thursday morning in January, it is entirely appropriate that we have a degree of flexibility. However, it is incumbent on us all to try to deal with the business before us as expeditiously as possible, so I shall try to explain precisely why we have proposed new clause 10, which would change the composition of Transport for London.
Clause 18 makes provision to have political appointees on Transport for London. The Mayor currently has complete freedom to appoint the board members of Transport for London, but the Bill would seem to give him even greater latitude. The provisions seem to imply that there are no political appointees on Transport for London’s board, but that all depends on how one defines political.
The composition of the Transport for London board is hardly a model of bipartisan consensus building. Apart from the Mayor himself, who is obviously Labour, there is Mr. Dave Wetzel, the vice-chair of the board. He is an admirable figure, with whom I have been in correspondence on a number of issues, but he is nevertheless the chair of the Labour Land Campaign. Among the other members, Paul Moore was vice-chair of transport at the Greater London council between 1981 and 1986, and is therefore, to put it at its best, an intimate friend and political ally of Ken Livingstone. Gulam Noon, another board member, is also a Labour party donor, while Patrick O’Keeffe is deputy regional secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union. Tony West, another board member, was previously assistant general secretary of ASLEF, and Toby Harris, a special adviser, is a career Labour politician, as we all know. One searches in vain among the board membership of TFL for any representation of any other political traditions or shades of opinion.
It is certainly the case that there are people who have technical expertise, and so it should be. It is also the case that some of those who have strong political views and trade union links also have technical knowledge that can enhance the operation of TFL; but to suggest or imply that the Mayor is constrained in appointing simply a board of technocrats would be a mistake. Equally, to believe that the Mayor needs extra latitude in order to have political support for his objectives would also be mistaken, since many of those who have been appointed are from his own political tradition.
What worries us is that there are no members of the board who represent any other political tradition or who can complement the Mayor’s insights or ideology. That is why we have tabled new clause 10. TFL could operate more effectively and, crucially, more accountably if its membership and composition replicated that of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority, which is one of the other functional bodies, and which people generally accept works well and whose operations we shall discuss later. Our model replicates the current LFEPA model, with representatives from both the Greater London assembly and the London boroughs. It is entirely appropriate to have both that political spread and that geographical spread.
I shall touch briefly on some of the issues with which Transport for London and the Mayor had to deal that emphasise the need for greater accountability and political diversity. First, championing buses has been one of the Mayor’s crusades. It appears that he has succeeded, by a variety of manoeuvres, in increasing the number of people in London who travel on buses. In many respects, that is a welcome manoeuvre. However, there was one decision that the Mayor took with regard to London buses that was nothing if not controversial, and that was of course the abolition of the Routemaster bus. Someone once observed:
“Only some ghastly dehumanised moron would want to get rid of the Routemaster.”
The person who made that pithy observation was of course Ken Livingstone, when he was running for Mayor of London. It was as Mayor of London, transformed from candidate to office holder and from insurgent to dehumanised moron, that he got rid of the Routemaster bus.
One reason why I am particularly sad that the hon. Member for Ealing, North is not in his place is that he has, of course, direct hands-on experience of what the Routemaster was like, because, in the 1960s, before he went to the London School of Economics, he was a bus conductor. He has been quoted as saying:
“I will weep if they finally go”.
He remembers having, when he was a bus conductor, to go upstairs to collect fares. He said he knew that anyone who was upstairs was either
“a smoker or a snogger” .
We know that he was previously in the former category; I shall leave it to the Committee to deliberate on whether he remains in the latter one. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman’s absence is due to the fact that he cannot bear to be here to discuss Transport for London, because that would inevitably force him to weep over the demise of the bus that he, and Londoners, loved so much.
I mentioned the Routemaster because there was undoubtedly huge public support for the continuation of that bus in service. It now survives only on a very few heritage routes. There are strong and compelling reasons, put forward by representatives of disability organisations, for change to the Routemaster and to bus provision. However, a variety of individuals have also argued that some modernisation of the classic Routemaster design could have accommodated those concerns. Nevertheless the Routemaster went, and unfortunately the wishes of the overwhelming majority of Londoners, who supported its retention in a poll commissioned by Policy Exchange and run by Populus, were overridden.