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4.58 pm
Mr. Martin Linton (Battersea): I support the Bill, which represents the second stage in the renewal of our constitution that the Government are putting into effect. Stage one was the referendums for Scotland and Wales; stage two opens the door to a Greater London authority, which will right the wrong done by the Conservative party in 1986. That party now supports the idea of a mayor, but seeks to deny the need for an assembly. That is no more than a fig leaf to hide the party's conversion and its admission that it was wrong before.
Most of the focus so far has been on the precise wording of the referendum question. I want to focus on part II, which deals with the electoral areas into which London should be divided for the election of assembly members.
London is already divided into 74 constituencies, 32 boroughs, 10 European constituencies and eight postal areas. It is envisaged that the assembly should have between 24 and 32 members. Some will argue that as there are 32 boroughs and up to 32 assembly members the obvious answer is to elect one per borough. Indeed, the Conservative party seems to be moving towards that notion.
It would, however, be a recipe for conflict. As the consultation paper says, it could lead to a focus on local rather than strategic issues. In other words, it could lead
to the pork barrel politics mentioned by The Guardian, in which the mayor buys the support of assembly members by handing out favours to their boroughs. It could also lead to a conflict of legitimacy between borough leaders and assembly members if they are of different parties--or to duplication if they are of the same party.
The next possibility is to divide London into its 10 Euro-constituencies and to elect three, or thereabouts, from each. It is fair to say, however, that few Londoners have any idea in which European constituency they live. Even political parties that need to work on the Euro-constituency basis face an uphill task in creating any kind of esprit de corps among constituencies thrown together in these rather amorphous conglomerates. Londoners feel that they do not correspond to any natural boundaries.
One of the great mercies of the decision to fight the next European elections on a proportional representation system lies in the fact that the boundary commissioners will no longer have to adjudicate in interminable boundary review inquiries.
The next possibility--in descending order--is the postal area system. Postal areas have the merit of corresponding much more closely to the way Londoners describe where they live. If London were divided into five sectors or zones--north-east, north-west, south-east, south-west and central--that elected five members each, that would yield a fairly compact assembly of 25 members, and it would have the enormous advantage that they represent areas with which Londoners already identify.
The objection might be that such sectors are too large to generate any accountability between the representative and the represented, but in truth any sense of representation has only ever existed at two levels: people go to see their local councillor or their local Member of Parliament. They have never queued up in huge numbers to see their county councillor or their GLC councillor; any more than they queue up--except perhaps in farming constituencies--to see their European Member of Parliament.
These zones would be entirely compatible with electing an assembly on a list system, with each party proposing five candidates and getting one elected for every 20 per cent. of the vote. This is essentially the system that will be used for the European elections in 1999, but it will not have the drawbacks associated with some types of proportional representation--lots of small parties and no party with a majority--because small parties will not be elected under the system. Someone would need a fifth of the votes--or at least more than a sixth--to be sure of winning a seat. There would effectively be a threshold of 17 per cent.
It would however still be quite possible for one party to win a majority in London--
Sir Paul Beresford:
The hon. Gentleman is talking as if he still wrote for The Guardian, giving us a clear exposition of the whys and wherefores, the pros and cons. Surely they all need to be given to Londoners to vote on. Otherwise the hon. Gentleman's remarks merely serve to confirm the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Sir N. Fowler). Londoners
Mr. Linton:
The hon. Gentleman, in turn, talks as though he were still leader of Wandsworth council. But he is missing the point. There is no point in giving the people of London an unrealistic alternative that will not work.
This will be the first time in our history when people have been asked to vote for an executive post. What is different about a vote for a mayor--or a president--is that it is a decisive vote. We can have a hung Parliament or a hung council; we cannot have a hung president or a hung mayor--at least not in the electoral sense. The point is that one individual has to win, so one party has to form an administration.
In any case, the role of the assembly is not to deliver a majority for the mayor, as the Green Paper puts it. The mayor already has the powers needed to run an administration. The main roles of the assembly will be to provide checks and balances, expertise and scrutiny, and to throw out a corrupt mayor if there ever is one. That is why we need both a mayor and an assembly. An assembly without a mayor, as the Liberal Democrats advocate, is a recipe for inertia. A mayor without an assembly, for which the Conservatives argue, is a recipe for sleaze. We need the combination that the Bill offers.
Mr. Ottaway:
The mistaken belief is beginning to emerge that the Conservative party does not believe in an assembly. We favour an assembly of borough leaders, not a directly elected assembly. That is quite different from the claim that we do not want an assembly at all.
Mr. Linton:
A meeting of borough leaders does not amount to an elected assembly.
Mr. Peter Brooke (Cities of London and Westminster):
I begin with an apology. Admirers of the Government are continually impressed by the Government's finesse, and the subject of tonight's debate has been tabled on the same night as the Lord Mayor's banquet. Some people have suggested to me that that was prompted by a conspiracy. Generous soul that I am, I assumed that it was more likely to be due to that alternative theory which I cannot utter, since we are still a long way from the watershed and this is a family programme. I do not blame the Government, but they have set me something of a dilemma in that I owe an obligation to my constituents in both regards. I therefore ask for the House's forgiveness if I disappear some time after my speech and read later about how the debate ended.
A great deal of newsprint has been expended on the attitude of the City corporation to the proposals before us. I can say with confidence that the City corporation will work with any new Greater London authority, just as it worked with the GLC in the past.
Some have said--my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Sir N. Fowler) has just done so--that tonight's debate is simply about one question or two. I think that there are some other questions as well, although clearly this is the central one. The Greater London authority of the Bill's title comprises both the elected assembly and the separately elected mayor--although I note that in clause 1(1) they are recounted in that order, not in the order bestowed on them in the schedule specifying the form of the ballot paper. Incidentally, that is an interesting disarrangement.
Remarkably little exegesis was afforded in the Green Paper to the provenance of the mayor, who in an executive capacity is an innovation in our local government constitutional arrangements, so perhaps his or her shallow roots, even in Labour party internal discussion about that before the election, are to be bolstered up by being regarded, not as a free-standing innovation per se, but as a partial element of a Greater London authority, which, at least, the Labour party has asked for throughout the past decade.
That umbrella phrase, however, is also the Government's rationale for the single question, on the ground that one cannot vote for the parts separately if they severally combine to compose the Greater London authority that the referendum asks us to approve. Because of the second rationale, the Government might reasonably have done a better job of explaining in the Green Paper why mayor and assembly must go hand in hand, like Jack and Jill, Crosse and Blackwell or Marks and Spencer--the latter are especially politically apposite, for in death they were not divided and Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer lie side by side in Highgate cemetery.
In a perfect world--although I realise that, especially at this moment, we do not live in one--the White Paper would have been available to inform tonight's debate, as the hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Mr. Hughes) said in his point of order before the debate.
As my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield said, the problem with the Green Paper is that many of its 61 questions were contingent on one another. Asking what the relationship should be on specific issues between mayor and assembly or between the authority and the regional development agency is often an empty question unless one constructs the entire scenario to reflect who will be responsible for what. Incidentally, the regional development agency looks like robbing the authority, in the main, of one of the three pillars that were originally postulated to support the logic of an authority.
My unease about these often relatively random questions was exacerbated by the Parkinsonian enthusiasm in the Green Paper for adding further random agenda to the assembly's tasks. I refer to Professor C. Northcote, not to Michael Parkinson--as I read the examples of extra possible topics for the assembly's inquiries, I had a far-off sense of Professor Parkinson's law that
In our original Queen's Speech debate on the constitution on 16 May 1997, I said that the Labour party had done very little detailed preparation, but I surmised that, as Sir Alec Douglas-Home once said in response to a question about VAT, a lot of clever chaps in the civil service were now thinking about it. The Minister--I hope that I do not offend against a confidential exchange between us--assured me in a note afterwards that they were.
My regret is that the product of that thinking has not been more precise on the assembly and whether it will follow present constituency and borough boundaries or take another form--the point which my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield addressed. To proceed to the text of the ballot paper without clarifying that would mystify, not demystify. It is possible to conduct a perfectly sensible debate between Government and Opposition on the nature of the countervailing body to the mayor, but it is difficult to know whether the Government are justified in their authority make-up if we do not know what detailed form their assembly will take.
I illustrate my concern with two local examples. The present study mounted by Westminster city council, "World Squares for All", which was showing in Whitehall last week, envisages that implementation will involve transferring traffic from the very heart of London to elsewhere in central London, including necessarily large parts of my constituency. The Government might sensibly argue that "World Squares for All" is a strategic issue, properly to be determined by the Greater London authority, but my constituents would be deeply troubled if they were to have no direct representation in the assembly to reflect their reaction to the consequences.
Similarly, there is current misgiving--not purely in my constituency but throughout London--about local decisions taken centrally, such as those taken by the London fire and civil defence authority. There would be very similar anxieties if my constituents felt that they would no longer have direct representation in debate about those decisions and at a level no broader than their local authority.
As my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield said, imprecision also surrounds how all this will be paid for. I acknowledge the sense of not specifying how it will be paid for until we know how the responsibilities will be carved up--in the Green Paper there is a reference to function--but that emphasises that the referendum cart is being put in front of the Greater London authority horse. In Ernie Bevin's great phrase,
The Minister spoke of 1,200 responses to the Green Paper and may feel that that justifies the reference to a great debate which the Green Paper's final paragraph hoped would take place up to 24 October, but my experience of a residents' annual general meeting in Bayswater last Thursday and my expectation of another in Belgravia this Wednesday has been that, at the level of voters--individual Londoners--the atmosphere of the moment is the same as the Pont cartoon in "Punch" early
in the last war, in which three intensely placid drinkers in an English pub are listening to a Lord Haw Haw debate being broadcast, and to the words:
"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion",
and sensed that the assembly must be found things to do. Initially, therefore, I am left with no clearer idea why the Siamese twins of the present somewhat imprecise conception must necessarily remain bound together.
"If you open that Pandora's Box you never know what Trojan 'orses will jump out",
but I doubt that even he would have linked a referendum to it.
"In England the entire population has been thrown into panic."
I said that the Bill prompted other questions. When I woke to hear the result of the Welsh referendum, I wondered whether the Bill that we had passed in the House had allowed for a recount. The 7,000 majority divided by 40 parliamentary seats would have produced an average of 175 per constituency, and I suspect that a returning officer would have granted a recount in such a parliamentary seat. I have, of course, read clause 6 of this Bill, but it seems not to cover the issue of a recount.
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