Schedule 2
Greater London Authority Bill
2:45 pm
Andrew Pelling (Croydon Central, Conservative)
I am happy to support my hon. Friend. It is interesting to note the comments made by Tony Travers in the book to which my hon. Friend referred; he is very critical of the assembly in not scrutinising the work of the Metropolitan police.
It is important to pass on some recollections of how the assembly kicked off on the issue of policing scrutiny, so that Committee colleagues understand how the establishment of a separate Metropolitan Police Authority made it difficult for assembly members to hold the police service to account in the way that they would have expected a London authority to do. The Metropolitan Police Service was very willing to give an initial briefing to assembly members, but one of the key messages from that briefing in the first week of the London assembly’s existence in 2000 was that the police service did not believe that the Greater London Authority Act 1999 provided the assembly with any role in the scrutiny of police service performance. As far as it was concerned, that was specifically the role of the Metropolitan Police Authority and its board, not assembly members.
That culture was further enforced by the approach that the current Mayor took on police service accountability, which may well have developed because it was important to be able to create the political capital required for his credibility. Bearing in mind his—and perhaps Lee Jasper’s—alleged baggage in their approaches to the police service, his style was that he had nothing to do with the operation of the police service and was not accountable to the assembly forit, because virtually everything that it did was an operational matter on which he was not accountable. If London assembly members want to ask questions about the performance of particular borough commands or specific parts of the police service, the Mayor’s response is that it is not his responsibility, but that of the commissioner.
My hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst also referred to the first experience of the assembly’s budget committee in dealing with the then commissioner, Lord Stevens. He turned up with as much regalia as possible dripping from his uniform so as to intimidate members of the assembly’s budget committee. More importantly, he gave us a strong message that he was sick and tired of being accountable to the Home Secretary, the Mayor, the London assembly, its budget committee and the Metropolitan Police Authority. Such a diffusion of accountability means that there is no worthwhile accountability at all.