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like a time bomb about to explode. That is just one aspect of this unremitting hostility to local government which has made the administration of London so difficult.There has been under-investment in the transport system, which not only creates misery for those who have to use it but which presents a real threat to the city's economic viability because the deficiencies in our transport system act as such a disincentive to new investment in the capital.
Mr. John Marshall : Will the hon. Gentleman confirm that the draft Labour Budget presented by the right hon. and learned Member for Monklands, East (Mr. Smith) contains no provision for increased spending on public transport in London? How much is he now proposing to spend, and has he agreed it with the hon. Member for Derby, South (Mrs. Beckett)?
Mr. Gould : First, there never was any such thing as a draft Labour Budget ; secondly, even if there had been and if the hon. Gentleman knew anything about Budgets, he would know that it would not have included provision for public spending.
Under-investment is seen at its most striking in education and training, in the health service and in protecting the environment. This under-investment leaves London and Londoners ill equipped to face a competitive future in which other European cities are forging ahead.
In addition to suffering from national policies, however, London has suffered from a particular set of Government policies that have disadvantaged the capital in special ways. Londoners have suffered from the impact of the poll tax and the damage resulting from the imposition of capping. They have suffered from the skewing of the grant system. But foremost among all these acts of damage was the act of political spite which, with the abolition of the GLC, deprived our city of a Londonwide voice.
Ministers who argue that Londoners were glad to see the demise of the GLC misrepresent the public attitude of the time and fail to understand the mood of Londoners today. The Evening Standard poll shows that two out of three Londoners want a voice for London, with the great majority of them favouring an elected citywide authority. Only one in five favour making no change, yet, with unerring accuracy, that is the very position adopted by the Secretary of State, whose absence today is notable. It shows how little interest he has in the future fortunes of our capital city.
This is precisely the position that the right hon. Gentleman adopts in his consultative paper, paragraph 28 of which states baldly : "The Government have no plans to change the general structure of local government in London."
Jibes at the GLC are hardly an adequate response to the overwhelming demand for change and for a London voice.
Londoners know that it is nonsense that our city, uniquely, has no citywide voice, no one capable of taking a strategic view of the needs and interests that we share as Londoners or of the future that should be ours. They see the contrast between London and other British cities, each of which has a citywide administration. They see the contrast with every other major capital city in the world. They know, for example, that London's ill-fated Olympic bid could not be taken seriously as long as there was no one to speak for London. They know that to insist that
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London is no more than a collection of boroughs that should be governed accordingly is to deny London's sense of community and identity, its history and its future.As the Evening Standard's leading article put it on28 May--I do not often quote leading articles from the Evening Standard --Londoners
"look upon themselves first and foremost as Londoners--citizens of the greatest, most historic, most beautiful and most-visited capital city in the world".
That is why Londoners support our proposals.
In the hands of a Labour Government, our measures will provide London with the benefits of national policies for investment in the basic public services, and a priority commitment to the improvement of those services rather than to an increase in consumption through tax cuts and unsustainable credit booms. Londoners will want the benefits that will flow to a local administration from a Government who value the role of local government and who want to see boroughs fulfilling their proper role in building houses, protecting the local environment, helping, in partnership with the private sector, to regenerate the local economy, and delivering high-quality services.
Mr. Steve Norris (Epping Forest) : In the hon. Gentleman's great tour de raison of London, one issue does not seem to have been addressed. Most pollsters are aware of the London Labour factor, which shows how voters in London consistently turn against the Labour party in any national evaluation of opinion. A resident of Lambeth who looks at what is happening in Wandsworth sees clearly what is wrong with London. It is that too many London boroughs are controlled by the Labour party.
Mr. Gould : I fear that the hon. Gentleman is not the assiduous reader of the Evening Standard that I took him to be. If he had read with care and attention the poll results published last week on precisely this subject, he would have discovered not only overwhelming support for every aspect of our proposals but the fact that Londoners, by a margin of four percentage points--43 per cent. to 39 per cent.--support Labour rather than his party. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman would like to make something of the difference between that lead and the lead of six percentage points that we enjoy in national polls, but I do not think that he wants to draw too much attention to those figures.
Londoners will especially welcome our proposals for a quality commission to encourage and promote the establishment and monitoring of high standards, which will be published and checkable, and for the provision for individual citizens of effective remedies if those standards are not met. Despite the Johnny-come-lately efforts of the Prime Minister to jump on the bandwagon, those measures offer a more real and certain prospect of efficient administration than can be offered by any Government who remain fundamentally hostile to local government.
Above all, Londoners want a new citywide, strategic, elected authority that will address the strategic interests of our capital city. They want a streamlined, professional, proactive, enabling authority that will take in hand the strategic planning of land use and economic development, the planning of our transport needs and the provision of our fire, police and emergency services. That authority will encourage our cultural life and will adopt an overall strategy to protect our environment.
Londoners have already responded to what we have said. They understand that we understand. We are offering them a compact for London. They want our policies, and
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they want a Labour Government. In their response to our forward-looking proposals for the capital, Londoners have shown that they are ready, willing and able to play their part in electing a Labour Government.4.18 pm
The Minister for Local Government and Inner Cities (Mr. Michael Portillo) : I beg to move, in line 1 to leave out from "House" to thend of the Question and to add instead thereof :
deplores the habit of the Labour Party to run down London in a way which, if taken seriously, would damage its image abroad, deter foreign investors and bring glee to London's competitor cities overseas ; emphasises that London is one of the world's finest cities with cultural and business attractions which have few rivals, a transport system as extensive as any in Europe and international hub airports which are the envy of others ; welcomes the decision of the Government to relieve London of the unnecessary and highly wasteful Greater London Council ; deplores Labour's plans to establish a still more wasteful London-wide body with powers to control the police which even the Greater London Council did not have ; welcomes the Government's enormous investment programme in public transport and in infrastructure in Docklands ; and salutes the Government's achievements of the last 12 years which have raised Britain's reputation abroad and with it that of her capital city'.
My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for the Environment and my hon. Friend the Minister for Housing and Planning are abroad. I know that they would have liked to speak in the debate. However, I am pleased that their absence gives me as a Londoner an opportunity to say that I am proud of this city and will happily compare its facilities and attractions with those of any city in the world. I take seriously my responsibility to speak up for London. I deplore Labour's attempts to denigrate our city, to make nothing of its recent achievements, and to blow its problems out of all recognition. The Opposition are doing all that they can to deter the foreign investor, to destroy tourism, and to damage our capital's economy. When people in Frankfurt and Paris read the motion tabled by the Labour party today, they will be whooping for joy. The difference between our city and those cities is that they do not have a Labour party to run them down in public.
How much more honest it would have been to have said that, yes, London suffers problems--problems much like those of other cities. But to refer to problems such as dirty streets as Labour does in its motion is to score a splendid own goal. People in Westminster do not complain about dirty streets, but people in Lambeth, Camden, Haringey and Islington do because there the Labour boroughs are failing to do their duty.
Many of London's problems are the problems of a successful city. Overcrowded tubes and congested roads are the sign of a city which is alive and flourishing, not a city on its knees.
How much more honest it would have been of the Labour party to say that most people regard our traffic as better than that in Paris, Rome or Madrid, or to say that the M25, although crowded in the rush hours, is none the less Europe's longest orbital urban motorway, which has made possible a range of journeys which people could not contemplate before.
How much more honest it would have been to acknowledge that London's vast underground system is 100 years old, one of the deepest in the world, requiring massive investment and today benefiting from a huge programme of investment of which the Labour party could
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not have dreamt. It is all the more needed today because, during the years in which the GLC owned the underground, as the irresponsible populist that it was, it cut the fares and so cut investment too, which is now having to be made good.Mr. Ken Livingstone (Brent, East) : Would the Minister care to point out to the House that the capital programme for London Regional Transport was under the control of the Government of the day via their majority in Parliament who were able to determine whether or not the money Bill was passed, and who, in preliminary negotiations with Treasury Ministers acting under Government instruction, told not just the Labour administration but the previous administration of Sir Horace Cutler that they would not allow the level of investment in London Regional Transport that successive GLC administrations wished?
Mr. Portillo : I am delighted to have drawn the hon. Gentleman to his feet. Those watching the debate at home will welcome the opportunity to be reminded about the government of London that we have shaken off, which is amply represented by the hon. Gentleman. [ Hon. Members :-- "Answer the question."] I will answer the question by saying that the hon. Member for Dagenham (Mr. Gould) spoke throughout his speech of under- investment, but last year investment in the underground was more than double in real terms what it was in the last year of the GLC, and our plans are to invest yet more in the underground.
The Government have a comprehensive strategy for improving transport in London. During the next three years, London Regional Transport plans to invest more than £3 billion, supported by a Government grant of £2.5 billion--an increase of 120 per cent. in real terms over the previous three years.
Talk to people in London. They have seen the opening of the new Thameslink service and the refurbishment of Liverpool Street station. We will be opening up docklands and poorly served areas of south-east London with the Jubilee line extension, which will cost more than £1 billion. The Bank extension of the docklands light railway will open on 1 July, and the Beckton extension will open at the end of next year. That will bring investment in the railway to some £700 million. A Bill providing for an extension to Lewisham is now before Parliament. We are also committed to another vast project : the east-west crossrail, which will link Paddington with Liverpool Street, bringing substantial relief to central London commuters. We have already safeguarded the routes of the Chelsea-Hackney underground railway line.
Unlike the Labour party, whose recent policy document talks glibly of a transport policy for London that
"takes traffic off the streets",
we recognise the reality--that many journeys and deliveries in London cannot easily be made by rail. We also recognise that massive road building in London is unacceptable. We have a programme involving expenditure of nearly £2 billion over the next 10 years, to make selective improvements to our trunk road networks and junctions and to get rid of the worst bottlenecks and accident blackspots.
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We also want to get more out of the existing road network, by means of better traffic management. The New Roads and Street Works Bill will lead to the proper co-ordination of street works. We plan a 300-mile network of red routes through our capital, on which traffic will move more easily, reliably and safely. Journey times on the pilot red route scheme established in north London have already been cut by up to 30 per cent.Mr. Chris Smith (Islington, South and Finsbury) : The Minister may well be right in saying that journey times for commuter traffic have been cut on the pilot red route. Takings in the shops along the route, however, have fallen dramatically, by 30 or 40 per cent., and the local people do not like the scheme and want it to be scrapped.
Mr. Portillo : Clearly the Labour party is opposed to any action that may cause problems. A succession of Labour Members have objected to private Bills relating to public transport--because they have some constituency interest, or because they have been put up to it. Time and again, public transport proposals are presented to the House and Labour Members object to them. Here is a proposal to get the traffic moving-- including the buses, which also benefit from red routes. Mr. Tony Banks (Newham, North-West) rose--
Mr. Portillo : Sure enough, as soon as a solution is advanced, we can look for the Labour Member who has jumped to his feet.
Mr. Banks : Surely the Minister remembers that it was the hon. Member for Hampstead and Highgate (Sir G. Finsberg) who objected to the last private Bill relating to London's transport : indeed, he attempted to talk it out. The Minister should get his facts right. There are many reasons why hon. Members may object to Bills. It is not that we do not want transport infrastructure investment ; we want to ensure that it is the right kind of investment.
Mr. Portillo : I made no mistake in my facts, as the hon. Gentleman's remarks implicitly acknowledged. It remains absolutely true that many Labour Members oppose private Bills relating to public transport.
Sir Hugh Rossi (Hornsey and Wood Green) : The question of red routes greatly affects my constituency. Two main problems have arisen. The first is the speed at which the traffic now moves along the red route, and the failure of the police to take steps to reduce the speed and the resulting danger. The previous problem, which was caused by congestion, has been reversed.
The second problem is experienced by a number of local tradesmen who find that parking bays sited on the advice of the local authority are too far from their shop frontages. Can that problem be examined?
Mr. Portillo : One of the great sadnesses in my life is the fact that I am no longer a Transport Minister. I shall, however, ensure that my hon. Friend's points are taken up. My hon. Friend the Minister for Public Transport will be winding up the debate, and I shall draw those remarks to his attention.
Mr. Michael Shersby (Uxbridge) : Will my hon. Friend give way?
Mr. Portillo : Yes, although I had better not do so too many more times.
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Mr. Shersby : My hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Sir H. Rossi) mentioned the problem of speeding vehicles. My hon. Friend the Minister will know that, in large parts of London, cameras are triggered automatically by vehicles that jump the traffic lights, and that the motorists responsible are prosecuted automatically. Is that not a substantial improvement in the policing of London?Mr. Portillo : It is certainly a good idea for us to be able to enforce the operation of traffic lights more effectively, for safety reasons.
Let us look further ahead. My right hon. and learned Friend the Secretary of State for Transport recently announced a wide-ranging study of traffic congestion in urban areas, which will include consideration of the possible role of road pricing in London and other cities.
The Labour party lives off grumbles and dissatisfaction as part of its election strategy. It does not matter that in the process it may demoralise our capital and do it untold harm.
Let no one be fooled into believing that the answer to London's problems is a new strategic body. If people believe that the streets are dirty, let them look to their borough councils which have clear responsibilities and let them use the Government's Environmental Protection Act 1990 to oblige inefficient Labour councils to do their duty.
If people are worried about those sleeping on the streets--they can be seen in every capital city--they should know that it is the Government who provided the London boroughs with a special homelessness initiative of £179 million to enable homeless families to be permanently housed, and that my hon. Friend the Minister for Housing and Planning has worked tirelessly with the voluntary sector to persuade people off the streets and into the direct access hostels which are there for them.
If people are worried about transport, they should know, as I have explained, that transport policy in London is already brought together under a single roof in the Department of Transport. That includes the underground, Network SouthEast, the strategic roads and the buses, and now those services have the resources that they need. If people are concerned about the need to co-ordinate planning, let me remind them that the Government have issued strategic planning guidance in place of the prescriptive, over-detailed GLC strategic framework which took 11 years to complete. In contrast, the present guidance as produced within a year of receiving the London planning advisory committee's advice. It allows the boroughs greater discretion in planning the development of their own areas and communities. They have quietly welcomed the new guidance as at last offering them a chance to bring forward comprehensive local plans that will reduce the old reliance on appeals to settle planning applications.
Mr. Tony Banks : Will the Minister give way?
Mr. Portillo : No. I want to keep going for a while.
As I have said, it took the GLC 11 years to produce its master plan and, when it finally emerged, inevitably it was out of date. It is no wonder that in those days the hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras (Mr. Dobson) described the GLC as
"the slowest bureaucracy this side of the Kremlin".
Meanwhile, areas such as docklands were left to rot, neglected by the GLC and the London Labour boroughs.
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Mr. Frank Dobson (Holborn and St. Pancras) : Will the Minister give way?
Mr. Portillo : I intend to quote the hon. Gentleman again. Would he like to save his intervention until then?
The GLC is unlamented and unmourned. It spent £1 billion a year, it increased its spending by 170 per cent. in five years, and it employed nearly 20,000 people. For what? Who misses its grants to the Fleet street and Media Workers creche, Babies Against the Bomb or the South-East London Women for Life on Earth? It is no wonder that the hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras said that the sooner it was abolished the better.
Mr. Dobson : I do not resile from either of the quotations. When the GLC was a major provider of housing and direct services such as that, it was far too vast and it was one of the slowest bureaucracies in the world. That was why I believed that it should be abolished. If the Minister had given the whole quotation, he would have realised that I wanted the GLC to be replaced by an authority covering the whole of London and with genuine strategic duties to carry out. Therefore, I am being perfectly consistent.
Mr. Portillo : I shall deal shortly with the vastness of the body that may be proposed by the Labour party.
The hon. Member for Brent, East (Mr. Livingstone) used to be the leader of the GLC. He said that he regretted that
"the Marshall Report did not push and say, Abolish the GLC' because I think it would have released massive resources which could have been put to more productive use".
No wonder--
Ms. Mildred Gordon (Bow and Poplar) rose--
Mr. Portillo : If the hon. Lady will forgive me, I shall keep going.
It is no wonder that the Labour party is ashamed of the GLC.
Mr. Portillo : I wish that the Labour party would get its act together. Whenever the hon. Member for Dagenham writes, appears in public or speaks on the radio--I am surprised that we keep hearing him on the radio, given his track record--he has to say that the Labour party does not intend to recreate the GLC. Therefore, it is clear that at least the hon. Member for Dagenham is ashamed of it. Unfortunately, when the hon. Gentleman says that he is not aiming to recreate the GLC, he is right : he is aiming to create something bigger, more bureaucratic and with wider powers.
Mr. Gorst : Surely what my hon. Friend the Minister is saying is that, although there may be no objection to a voice and an intelligent head, there is every objection to a large body with the fat corporation that goes with it.
Mr. Portillo : My pleasure in agreeing with my hon. Friend is mitigated to some extent only by the fact that he has stolen the next two pages of my speech.
Mr. Gould : If the Minister is going to use the next two pages of his speech to endorse his hon. Friend's comments are we to hear another U- turn this afternoon and a commitment to precisely the voice for London which his hon. Friend commended to him?
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Mr. Portillo : Why does not the hon. Gentleman merely be patient and hear my speech?Let us look more closely at the recent Labour party document. In many areas, its so-called "streamlined" GLA would have more extensive powers than the GLC ever enjoyed. It would control the fire service, land-use planning, tourism, and culture, and it would have oversight of London Regional Transport and traffic movements. Most significantly of all, it is proposed to give the GLA authority over the police. The GLC in its day gave more than £2 million to so-called police monitoring groups. In 1983-84 it gave £8,500 to the Campaign to Curb Police Powers, nearly £18,000 to the Gay London Police Monitoring Group and nearly £30,000 to Camden Policing the Police. To those people it is now proposed to hand over authority for the police.
The lure of such new powers prompted the hon. Member for Brent, East, the former leader of the GLC, to summon a meeting of the GLC in exile to be held in the House next week. The Labour leadership moved in to crush so transparent an exposure of its true intentions and cancelled the meeting.
Mr. Tony Banks rose --
Mr. Portillo : I shall give way at the conclusion of my speech. A spokeswoman for the Labour party said :
"It was just an old boys reunion, if you like I know they've never had a reunion before, but it was just an ad hoc sort of thing."
None the less, we were assured that the hon. Members for Brent, South (Mr. Boateng) and for Newham, North-West (Mr. Banks) "completely disassociated" themselves from the meeting, although why anyone should disassociate himself from "an old boys' reunion" or from
"an ad hoc sort of thing"
is not clear to me.
Mr. Banks : The Minister is making a ridiculous fool of himself by trying to suggest that there was a conspiracy. The person who wanted to organise the get-together was Harry Kay, the vice-chairman of the council. I resisted it for a long time because I thought that it would be very expensive on my pocket to buy drinks for Harry and all his mates, but he managed to get Ken Livingstone to do it. Ken fell for it.
Mr. Portillo : The old boy doth protest too much, I think. If people are concerned to hear a single voice for London, singing London's praises and promoting London to the outside world, bringing together the public and the private sectors, then I have some sympathy.
We had in London a single organisation of the London boroughs, the London Boroughs Association. It did not support the GLC, so the Labour boroughs took their bat home. They went off to form a rival body--the Association of London Authorities--thus ensuring that London's voice would be cracked and discordant. Across London, Labour's antipathy to the private sector, to the City and to the people who make London work has meant that it holds back from joining with the wealth-creators to promote London. Indeed, today's motion shows that it wishes to denigrate London, not promote it. That same antipathy to enterprise has guided Labour Members in their opposition to the regeneration of docklands. They opposed the creation of the LDDC. They
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carp about the immense achievements of the development there. They sing the praises of windswept, brutalist modern architecture in Paris, whilst attacking the beautiful fountains, parks, and riverside walkways of Canary wharf--simply because no bureaucrat in county hall had a hand in planning Canary wharf.Despite the Labour party, other world cities look with envy at docklands as the area where the city can expand, a vast area where new growth can occur without putting an intolerable burden on our traditional centres.
If people want to know the truth about London, they should not ask the Labour party. They should ask the people who have money to invest. In a recent survey of American leading managers, 49 per cent. named London as their preferred European business location against 17 per cent. for Brussels and 17 per cent. for Frankfurt. London scored best on ease of access to markets, customers or clients, telecommunications, and the costs and availability of staff. It also scored highly on transport--yes, second only to Paris--availability of office space and on the climate that the Government create for business.
Can anyone seriously imagine that such people's propensity to invest in London would be encouraged if London were once again represented by the hon. Member for Brent, East as leader? Can anyone imagine that Japanese business men would feel more warmly about investing in London if they were met at Heathrow by the hon. Gentleman? Can anyone seriously believe that London would stand taller just because we put another layer of bureaucracy over our heads?
Can anyone seriously believe that London would enjoy the worldwide attention that it does today were it not for the fact that, after 12 years of Conservative government, Britain once again counts for so much in the world ? London does not need another layer of government : it needs less Labour government in places such as Lambeth. Even the Labour party seems to agree, since it has now suspended Joan Twelves, the leader, and many of her colleagues.
In 1987, it was the London Labour party which first set Labour nationally on the skids for the general election. The London Labour party's proposals to recreate the waste and silliness of the GLC, and extend its powers to the police, are another albatross around the neck of the Labour party. Labour's proposals are immoderate, wasteful and plain dangerous. That is why I urge the House to support the amendment.
4.42 pm
Mr. Ken Livingstone (Brent, East) : No-one would wish to re-create the GLC in the form in which it existed. Let us remember that it was not created by a Labour Government. It was created by a Conservative Government under Harold Macmillan, in order to ensure Conservative control of the capital. In the debates and discussions that took place on the White Paper, many good ideas were suggested. Those ideas were endorsed by a broad consensus in local government, by academics and by the business community. But they were ignored in the legislation that created and set up the GLC.
From its beginning, the GLC was flawed. It was caught between being a strategic authority without the powers to perform that function and a body which overlapped and conflicted with the boroughs in the provision of personal
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services. That was recipe for conflict. The personal services should have been the responsibility of the boroughs. It was nonsense to create an authority that had such a vast housing stock. But the Government of the day did not want to create a proper strategic body, because it would have meant surrendering some of the powers of central Government to people elected by Londoners, who might take a different view from that of the Administration of the day. That is why I spoke against the GLC when I was a member of it. It had completely lost its way.Between 1981 and 1985, we made no pretence. We did our best with a flawed structure. In starting afresh, we shall not repeat that mistake. When I spoke in the debate which has been much quoted, I was thinking in particular of the metropolitan authority that controlled Toronto--one of the most successful cities in north America. Toronto has doubled its size and is one of the most attractive cities to live in. It has a strategic, slimline authority which co-ordinates and deals with major policy such as transportation, industrial regeneration, training and so on. But it does not get involved in day-to-day service delivery. That is the model that we shall wish to develop, explore and expand.
When I hear some of the old nonsense that we have just had to put up with, I wish that I had tape-recorded some of my conversations with Ministers when I was leader of the GLC. I remind Conservative Members that, as leader of the GLC, I met some of them in their previous incarnations when they were blocking what we sought to do. When the Labour GLC was elected in 1981, we took up the legacy of Sir Horace Cutler to create a docklands tube by extending the Jubilee line out there. That proposal had been blocked under Sir Horace's administration and was still blocked. Within the first few weeks of the election, I went to see the Conservative Minister of Transport. I put our proposals to him. We were told that we could not implement them. It was not that we were asking the Government to give us the money--we were prepared to build the tube out to docklands out of our revenue.
The GLC was opposed to borrowing. Conservative Members who pretend to be monetarists might like to examine the accounts of the GLC. The only borrowing for capital works that we undertook was for housing, because the Government of the day were prepared to pay about 80 per cent. of the cost. All the remaining capital works of the GLC were paid for as we went.
During the lifetime of my administration at county hall, we almost halved the debt burden of the GLC in real terms. We do not want to hear this nonsense about profligacy. If central Government had reduced their debt burden by half in their 12 years, the nation would be in a much better state.
We were not in conflict with the City. The chambers of commerce and industry came to see me as leader of the GLC in the midst of another downturn in the economy caused by the Government. They said that they were straining, and asked us to reduce the rates that year by 7.5 per cent. We co-operated with them and did so. We cut the rates twice. Why were we able to do so? It was as a result of the success of our transport policy.
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