Schedule 2
Greater London Authority Bill
2:30 pm
Bob Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst, Conservative)
I wish to express my pleasure at seeing you back in the Chair for the remainder of the Bill’s progress, Lady Winterton. I hope that the proceedings will not take too long, but the topic under discussion is particularly important. This package of amendments and new clauses, on which we shall want to vote at the appropriate time, is central to policing.
In many ways, policing is one of the key areas of the GLA group’s responsibility and the way in which it is handled at the moment is needlessly diffuse. Policing is regularly in the top one or two worries of Londoners. Polls regard it as very important. Successful policing in London is vital to the future of the city and our amendments would strengthen the role of the Mayor in it. I hope that our approach gives the lie to earlier suggestions that we are opposed to a strategic authority. We are not. We want to make sure that it and the Mayor as its elected strategic head concentrate on matters that are genuinely strategic and can clearly only be delivered sensibly on a pan-London basis. Policing manifestly fits that bill. That is why we are worried that the present arrangements are something of a hotch-potch.
Everyone expects the Mayor of London to have a keen interest and involvement in policing. The Government have said before during our proceedings that they are wedded to the strong mayor model. Looking at the experience particularly of north America, a strong mayor model suggests to most ordinary Londoners and observers a direct involvement in policing matters. Everyone thinks of Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg in New York. What do they know about them? There was a problem with policing in New York. Mayor Giuliani was elected; Mayor Giuliani was the man who was credited with fixing it. Had he got it wrong, he would have paid the penalty by losing office.
It seems that city-dwellers strongly link the idea of a strong, executive Mayor with the idea that that person should be answerable for policing and community safety issues. We should not think in terms of narrow policing, but as a broader point, people expect that direct linkage.
If we ask the average Londoner what the Mayor should do, the answer would be that he should certainly sort out transport and policing, and make sure that the streets are safe. Worry about safety throughout the city is regularly at the top of Londoners’ concerns; although we might disagree about some of the detail, it is something on which there is a consensus. Safety is vital to any civilised city and for London to maintain its pre-eminence as a world city—some would say, “the” world city—getting it safe is crucial. People would expect that the Mayor should have direction of that key policy, but in fact the system does not give him that clear and transparent direction or a clear sense of accountability. That position might have arisen, as is often the way, deep in the mists of the discussions in the Government when the original scheme for the legislation was pulled together.
As I observed earlier in Committee, there is no particular magic to the composition of any of the functional bodies. They evolved perhaps for historic purposes and for functional reasons. Nor is there particular magic in the composition of the policy authority. The fact that we have a police authority for London is, I concede, an improvement on the position when the Home Secretary was the police authority. That is a step in the right direction, which is why I was willing to argue the case for a London-wide city governance when it was not always fashionable to do so in my party. I do not criticise the work of members of the Metropolitan Police Authority. I could hardly do that, since I am one of its members. However, that does not alter the fact that accountability is not straightforward, and not as good as it could be. We are seeking to improve the means by which policing is welded into the mainstream of mayoral functions and city government.
Tony Travers, the academic to whom we referred earlier, said that the structure that came out of the discussions between various Government Departments on how the new Greater London authority should be set up leaves something of a mangle. It is clear to anyone who has read the literature, or who has looked at the history of the matter, that the Home Office fought like a cat in a sack to avoid the handover of significant policing powers to London.
I give credit to the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr. Raynsford) for his work on the Greater London Authority Act 1999, because he managed to fight off some of the rearguard action of the Home Office. Now, six years after the event, weare seeking to go further toward the logic that that right hon. Gentleman may have had in mind, namely that people expect the Mayor to have executive responsibility for policing. By executive responsibility, I do not mean operational control. In our system, politicians do not have operational control of the police at any level, and neither should they. Executive responsibility should be executive in the sense that the Mayor should be intimately involved in the appointment of the commissioner and other key staff, give the strategic overview and thrust to policing in London, and be the person who is politically accountable, who carries the can for policing in London. That is what we are seeking to do here. The system, despite its good intentions and its halfway move forward, is difficult.
Mr. Travers, in his useful book, “The Politics of London”, refers to a four-way split of accountability for policing, something that I think no one would dispute. We have the Mayor, who has responsibility for setting the budget, and for appointing some members of the Metropolitan Police Authority. He is also consulted on the appointment of the commissioner. The assembly has an involvement. Assembly members are accountable, in a sense, because they set the budget. Of course, without rehashing our earlier discussions, the assembly can only set the budget on high-level terms, and cannot get into the detail. Some members of the assembly serve on the authority and others do not, meaning that the accountability of assembly members to their constituents on policing matters varies. Because I happen to be a member of the authority, it is much easier for me to take up issues of policing in Bexley and Bromley than it is for, say, my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, Central, who does not have the same ease of access. Is that situation logical?
The Metropolitan Police Authority itself has responsibility. It carries out certain limited, non-operational executive functions, and has a scrutinyrole. In practice, however, the scrutiny role of the authority—its members would concede—is much less developed than the scrutiny role of the assembly. The current chair of the authority, an old and respected friend of myself and the Minister, is conscious of that situation, and has sought to improve it since he took over. The fact is that the scrutiny role of the MPA is much less than one might expect.
The final strand of accountability is the commissioner himself. He is responsible for day-to-day operations and has a line of accountability not only to the Mayor, the authority and the assembly, but to the Home Secretary, who sits somewhere in all of this as well. That is inevitable because of London’s position as the capital city, but we could make things a lot easier with a little rationalisation, which is what we are suggesting.
Against the background of at least four and arguably five lines of accountability for London, it is not easy for Mr., Mrs. or Ms Londoner to know who carries the can if anything goes wrong with policing in London, or who should have the praise when things go well. Who is ultimately accountable? It could, in theory, be any one or any mixture of those. That does not sit well with the Government’s apparent commitment to improving accountability and transparency in service delivery, something that we agree with in principle.
For that reason, it is not surprising that the previous Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir John Stevens, now Lord Stevens, has said himself on a numberof occasions that he found the accountability arrangements difficult to deal with. Once he said to the assembly’s budget committee in some exasperation, “I don’t know who I’m supposed to be accountable for.” I do not think that it was entirely in jest. The situation is needlessly confused. If Lord Stevens felt that, I suspect that the average London resident does as well.
Despite the best of intentions in trying to find a compromise that would satisfy the Home Office and the other conflicting Departments and could be reconciled with the Government’s desire for city-wide governance, perhaps part of the error lay in saying that the Metropolitan Police Authority should try to replicate as far as it could in London the Government system for police authorities elsewhere—a certain number of “local authority” or equivalent assembly members, some magistrates and some independents. That is why it differs from the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority, which had an established model involving borough councillors instead. One might think that LFEPA would have been a better model for a separate functional body system in London.
The error was to assume that what works and is appropriate elsewhere in the country should be appropriate in London. We argue that it is not. London is unique in size and complexity. It is not necessary to have the same governance structure here as in the rest of the country for governing the city or delivering services such as policing. The GLA was intended to be a unique solution to a unique situation. London is by far the largest city in western Europe and one of the largest in the western world, and it needs its own tailor-made structures.
Those structures should have democratic accountability. That accountability is provided by the Mayor and the assembly, both of which have mandates. That is why we propose effectively to place the Mayor and the assembly as the police authority for London, and that is how the new clauses are structured. Executive power would go to the Mayor, as most people would expect, as well as the MPA’s executive functions. The Mayor would not gain any greater operational control, but accountability would clearly focus on him. When he stands for election saying, “I am going to do something about policing in London,” it will be a pledge that he cannot get away from, because it will be his legal responsibility.
Scrutiny, which is vital and could be improved, falls to the assembly, which the Government concede is a scrutiny body meant to deal with such issues. Our proposed system fits very well with the Government’s own rhetoric earlier in the Committee’s proceedings. It would mean that all London assembly members could scrutinise the work of the police. Every constituency member will have the same degree of access, and members elected on a London-wide, non-constituency basis—the argument being that they will be able to represent more broadly with a non-geographic constituency—would have the same access and ability. I submit that that would give much better and more logical scrutiny, as the entire assembly would be involved.
We accept that the particular role of magistrates should be preserved, so we have provided for an entrenched committee, which I shall come to in a moment. Under the current arrangement, the Mayor negotiates with the MPA, which then makes a budget bid to the Mayor. We say that the Mayor has the executive power—that is explicit in the new clause—and he would set the policing component of the budget. That would be scrutinised by the assembly and the budget process would then take place. Nothing would change in that respect. There would still be a separate policing component within which the Mayor would doubtless negotiate with the commissioner and the assembly’s police committee.
New clause 23 would set up a specific police committee. There are two reasons for doing that: the particular importance of policing, which is the No. 1 or No. 2 concern of Londoners, and the fact that policing is the service that consumes two thirds of the council tax precept, so it is particularly appropriate that there should be a specific safeguard on police scrutiny.
The assembly has, voluntarily, a transport committee to scrutinise the work of Transport for London, but under the proposal it would be obliged to have a police committee, whose members would of course all have democratic mandates. To preserve the particular, valuable insight that can be given by magistrate members, we propose that that committee—uniquely of those in the GLA—should have four co-opted magistrate members who could be involved in the deliberations. That would preserve an analogy with other UK practice, but tailor the situation to the circumstances in London.
We do not propose independent members, because we think that the wide range of experience of all25 assembly members adequately covers the experience that might be required through independent members if there was a narrower so-called political membership. I respect the work of my independent colleagues on the police authority, but the key point is that they have no mandate from anyone, other than through a process of selection and appointment. Under our system, everybody with executive control—the Mayor—or who was involved in scrutiny in the assembly would have a democratic mandate, which would make policing for London more transparent and accountable, and reduce some of the bureaucracy that has resulted from the compromise that we suspect represents the gestation of the current arrangements.
That is the thinking, and we submit that it accords well with the Government’s logic. We therefore invite them to accept the amendment, which would enhance delivery of policing and allow Londoners to feel that there was a clear chain of responsibility that they could call upon when necessary.