Clause 36
Greater London Authority Bill
5:45 pm
Karen Buck (Regent's Park and Kensington North, Labour)
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for rightly drawing my attention to those facts. I was reaching a conclusion, which is this: we need urgently to rise to the environmental, value-for-money and economic challenges of this agenda, but there are few signs that London boroughs, either individually or collectively, can do that. That is the case often for good reason, but it is sometimes because, as he says, we are moving in opposite directions.
If the Government were to recognise that the well intentioned but messy and ineffective proposals on the table are not sufficient to allow us to rise to those challenges, it would be a timely and necessary step. I hope that Ministers are willing to be persuaded by the Mayor’s argument and to make changes to their proposals, even at this late stage.