Examination of Witness (Questions 700-719)
KEN LIVINGSTONE
8 JULY 2008
Q700 Chairman: Welcome, Mr Livingstone.
This could be one of those occasions where I just get my question
out and then we get called to vote, giving you a quarter of an
hour to think of the answer.
Ken Livingstone:
More evasive than normal then!
Q701 Chairman: I am sure you will
not be evasive in front of us, especially when I ask you to give
us some kind of thumbnail sketch of how your relationships with
ministers in the UK Government actually operated during your time
as Mayor?
Ken Livingstone: I must have met
a government minister about once a week for eight years, and it
was a regular round of I wanted more money and I wanted more powers,
and what I found was that, even when broadly the minister agreed
with what I was doing, it was difficult to get a decision in under
two or three years. If there was any point of disagreement, nothing
ever got resolved. Even on relatively small issues, like whether
or not we should require utility companies to put down a duct
so that any duct burrowed out once could then be used indefinitely,
where the minister agreed. This rumbled on as a debate for years
and did not get resolved, and still we wait for such things to
happen. There was a moment when Jackie Smith had just become Home
Secretary, and I was at my second meeting with her when I realised
most of the items on the agenda had been at my first meeting,
seven years previously, with Jack Straw. You got something that
got you through for another year but never really getting resolved;
and I thought there was an unbelievable inability to get a decision
out of Government, even when it was not controversial. I think,
because as a local government councillor I had been involved in
deputations to ministers going right back to Peter Walker's time
under Edward Heath, it was the worst government of my lifetime
to get a decision out of, and I suspected that was because so
much power had been sucked to the centre in Downing Street and
within Downing Street there was a conflict between Number Ten
and 11, so even when it got to Downing Street you could not resolve
the issue unless the Chancellor and the Prime Minister broadly
agreed.
Q702 Chairman: Does that mean that
these problems relate to a particular government, or would that
be a bit unrealistic? Are they not going to happen in some form
or other under most governments where the powers that you are
talking about require a government decision as well as your own
decision?
Ken Livingstone: I think this
Government is worse than others, because so much was centralised.
Relatively minor decisions, which Mrs Thatcher and other Prime
Ministers would have left to their Cabinet ministers, still had
to be agreed at the centre. No, I think there is that institutional
problem that the Civil Service really does not want to let anything
go. Even when you could get a minister to agree with you, they
would often come back and try and block it. I think there was
an institutional problem that they knew any power they gave up
was a bit less of their empire. I can think of the one that is
still running on and Boris Johnson has to resolve, which is the
question of who lets the franchises for the suburban services
serving London. Most of them go a few stations over the boundary,
which always gave Civil Servants the ability to point out dozens
of reasons why the Mayor could not possibly let the franchise.
We eventually persuaded Tony Blair's Government to give the Mayor
the power to let the franchise for Silverlink and we were still
negotiating with Ruth Kelly about whether or not we could take
over the southern franchise, almost wholly contained within London,
and that was still rumbling on when I left. It had gone on for
about two years, the Silverlink decision, about two or three years.
If I think back, I cannot remember if it was the northern or western
ticket hall at Kings Cross, but the Treasury suddenly got in a
panic—it was costing too much—and put a stop on it.
We then had two years of meetings discussing it, eventually recognising
you had to build it. It is the interchange: it is a box under
ground where people coming in on the Thameslink could interchange.
They came back and decided, after two or three years had been
wasted, yes, it would have to go ahead. I cannot remember, but
I think it most probably ended up costing more than when they
stopped it. I should imagine the biggest single item of my job
was not dealing with the Assembly, it was just trying to coax
ministers, working my way all the way up to the Prime Minister
and the Chancellor, to take relatively minor decisions which in
almost any other city in Europe or America would be, at most,
an issue between the Mayor and the Governor or the Mayor and the
Länder but certainly would not have involved the Central
Government.
Q703 Chairman: Do you think, and
did you ever compare notes to find out, that you were in a weaker
position than, let us say, Scottish and Welsh ministers trying
to get decisions out of government at Westminster?
Ken Livingstone: We are in a much
weaker position, because there was a real devolution of powers
both to Scotland and to Wales. The Government was much more nervous
about London and much more inclined—
Q704 Chairman: Because it is London.
Ken Livingstone: Because it is
London, and also the worry that you might have someone there that
would not do what you wanted, and there were huge numbers of reserve
powers in the Act setting up the GLA that allowed ministers to
step in and overturn the Mayor, plus 55% of the income to the
Greater London Authority was direct or indirect grant from the
Chancellor. So you always were in a position that, if you ever
really upset the Government, they could make your life very difficult.
It has left me totally committed to a federal structured government,
like, say, West Germany or the United States of America, so these
powers get really devolved to people who are much more directly
accountable.
Q705 Chairman: What were relations
like further down between officials?
Ken Livingstone: The difference
between the devolution to London and Scotland and Wales: Scotland
and Wales were the traditional relationship between politicians
and Civil Servants. Basically, the officials at the GLA were my
officials. I was able to sack them and get rid of them indirectly
because it was done through the Assembly, and, therefore, I did
not inherit something like the Scottish or Welsh Office with its
deeply ingrained traditions, we created it from scratch, and that
is why now Boris Johnson is making substantial changes amongst
the layer of Civil Servants, as he is entitled to do, because
the Mayor is the elected executive. It is my signature on the
lease for the building, it is my signature on the photocopier
contract. You are not working through somebody, and had we been,
we would never have got the congestion charge or the expansion
of the buses. The Mayor is responsible. There is no-one else to
blame when it goes wrong.
Q706 Chairman: If there had been
some kind of English structure you were dealing with, as opposed
to a UK structure, would it have made any difference?
Ken Livingstone: I do not know.
I think such a head of steam built up over decades for Scottish
and Welsh devolution that there really was not much Civil Servants
could do about it. It was what John Smith called "the settled
will". In the GLA it was really starting from scratch and,
I have to say, many Civil Servants, particularly in GOL, at that
stage were arguing for a real aim.
Q707 Chairman: Government Office
for London.
Ken Livingstone: Government office
for London. There was a strong rear-guard action from the Home
Office against any real mayoral power over the Commissioner of
Police or even over the Metropolitan Police Authority. So the
only power the Mayor has, which is a big one, is to set the budget.
I remember Jack Straw saying to me, "I would like to have
gone further, but you could not let London be too out of line
with the rest of England." They did not think London might
be an experiment that would lead the rest of England. Of course,
I now find myself in agreement with the Conservative Party and
Boris Johnson in that I do believe it is right that the Mayor
should appoint the Commissioner of Police and should be answerable
to someone who is answerable to London.
Q708 Chairman: How significant was
Government Office for London? You have spoken about having endless
meetings of ministers to resolve difficulties. Is Government Office
for London an irrelevance?
Ken Livingstone: In the times
before it was thought that—. If you think back, in the run-up
to the first mayoral election, for a long period the presumption
was that I would not be allowed to stand, and I would not think
of leaving the Labour Party, so they structured it on the assumption
that I would not be there, and even then they built in very strong
constraints. When I did turn up there, suddenly the Government
Office, which had been quite keen to devolve and try this experiment,
was under real pressure to watch everything I was doing and for
about three years the mantra was there could be no reopening of
this settlement for years to come, "We want to see several
terms", and so on. Certainly, once I came back into the Labour
Party, that became more relaxed and we got a second round of legislation.
The Government Office for London at that point started to fade
a bit into the background, but they were quite active as a presence
between the period between my first election and my second; much
less so in the second term.
Q709 Mrs James: You have talked a
little bit about how the role changed, et cetera. Would
you say that the powers of the Greater London Authority have changed
since 1999, and how do you perceive they have changed?
Ken Livingstone: I remember during
the debates, because I was on the committee passing the legislation,
Nick Raynsford repeatedly said that the prestige of the post will
allow the Mayor to do more, and I was deeply cynical about that,
but it did turn out that, simply because you were the directly
elected Mayor, you had access to business and to foreign governments
and to international institutions in a way that, I think, would
not be the case if you simply had the leader of a council. American
politicians clearly understood the nature and role of the mayoralty.
Immediately after my election we were facing the closure of Ford.
I was able to pick up the phone and get straight through to the
boss of Ford in America, meetings were set up and I do not think
that would have been the case if I had been the leader of a council.
I think they thought the Mayor of London was most probably as
powerful as the Mayor of New York—sadly, this was not the
case—and I got a very good response, and once the Government
settled down and it was not so nervous about me, we started lobbying
for more powers. I was quite careful in this. I only lobbied to
takeover from central government the things that central government
was doing badly—housing policy in London, skills, and so
on, and waste. I did not waste my time trying to persuade them
to give me things that were not a problem, just to focus on the
ones that were not working well.
Q710 Mrs James: Do you think that
impacted in a way upon your successor and that he is going to
possibly have a better time of it or a more defined role?
Ken Livingstone: I think Boris
will have quite a good two years, because a whole series of financial
commitments have been given to the Mayor and, if the Labour Government
was seen to renege on any of those, it would be catastrophic for
their public standing to be seen to be punishing Londoners for
having elected someone they did not like. I think Boris may have
more of a problem if there was a change of government and it was
looking for major cuts in public spending. I think these might
be the best two years of Boris Johnson's mayoralty and he should
make the most of it.
Q711 Mrs James: And for the Assembly
in general?
Ken Livingstone: I think that
the weakness of the GLA system was that it is a purely American
system, so the executive power rests with the mayor. If you look
at many of the American cities, there the City Council has real
powers over planning and has the power to have minor legislation,
like the writing of by-laws and so on, so I do not think they
were really given enough to do. Also, I think the Assembly would
tend to come into its own much more if you had a mayor that was
personally corupt or following a very extreme ideological agenda.
We have broadly created a consensus about where London was going.
Therefore, there was not much for them to get dug into, and I
think as well that they would have been more effective looking
at things, not specifically GLA powers. Often when they did, when
they looked at the state of football clubs, they tended to get
more attention with their advice on things like that, or the state
of borough parks and so on.
Q712 Alun Michael: You have already
referred to comparisons with the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh
Assembly. Your role as mayor was an executive role. In the case
of Scotland you have got the Executive and in Wales they have
moved in that direction from originally a single body to a split
between the Executive and the Assembly. How would you compare
the role of the executives in those two cases and your role and
that of your team, as it were?
Ken Livingstone: The job is so
demanding. I had occasional contact with the Welsh and Scottish
bodies, but they were very limited. It is a 24/7 job, and you
just got on with what you had and made the best of what you had
got. Whenever I bumped into people from the Scottish and Welsh
authorities I was always rather envious of their wide-ranging
powers, certainly Scotland's taxation power.
Q713 Alun Michael: You would have
used that, would you?
Ken Livingstone: I would have
used it. I would have preferred it if it could have been more
progressive than just two pence up or two pence down. That is
the reason the Labour Government seems to have so many problems
today. It tied itself into not redistributing tax through a progressive
system.
Q714 Alun Michael: That model of
the Mayor and the Assembly, what are the advantages and disadvantages
of it?
Ken Livingstone: I remember for
five years as the leader of the GLC my focus was wholly internal
to the Council and managing the Labour caucus and making sure
we won all the votes. As Mayor, my focus was completely outside
of the Assembly to a coalition of business interests, to lobbying
for Crossrail, with the Greens, and so on, so I think I went from
being the manager of the party caucus, which is really what every
council leader is—even in hugely safe majorities often you
have to manage it more than where you have got a narrow one—and
I do not believe that we would have been able to get the congestion
charge or the consistent expansion of the buses. We had a seven-year
expansion of buses and policing. If I had had to win votes from
the Assembly, there would have been those who would have said,
"We cannot afford it. The boroughs are too pressed",
or whatever. I think as well the ability to get so much done so
quickly, having been totally hostile to the idea of a directly
elected executive, I am now completely besotted with the idea.
Tony Blair was the only person in the Labour Party who had this
idea. The others were all broadly unsympathetic. I think he saw
it as a substitute. He actually could not be a directly elected
Prime Minister with executive powers. This at least gave him an
idea of experimenting at a lower level, and I have to say, I think
most probably recruiting a government from Parliament is not the
best place to look. I think the executive model of government
might very well be a better place to look, as the Israelis have
done. They have kept a Prime Minister but directly elected somebody
whose job is the role of government and the legislator should
be the role of oversight and legislation, the actual day-to-day
executive managing. If you come to look at people as talented
as, say, Charles Clarke or Alan Milburn, managing huge bureaucracies
like the Home Office or the Health Service, I do not believe you
can manage stuff from Westminster, not direct services.
Chairman: The Committee will be suspended
for 15 minutes. I expect it only to be one vote.
The Committee suspended from 4.34 pm to
4.48 pm for a division in the House
Q715 Alun Michael: You did quite a good
job, Ken, of telling us the pros of the system that is there in
place. What about the cons?
Ken Livingstone: I actually have
to say that I have just been through an election where I was constantly
asked: "What has been your biggest mistake?" and I think
on all the major issues we took the right decision. It may not
be perceived that way nationally, but it was there to make the
case for London.
Q716 Alun Michael: I am sorry, this
is about the Mayor and Assembly model.
Ken Livingstone: It is quite interesting.
When this was first going through Parliament the original idea
was that the assembly would not be a paid job. Then we had a change
of heart, it was going to be a paid job, and I remember Nick Raynsford
talked about it being an almost permanent session, discussing
all the things that mattered to London, and we envisaged—
Q717 Chairman: You are talking about
the Assembly.
Ken Livingstone: The Assembly,
yes. It was set up and part of the problem was that a lot of the
members still had local government interests—some were in
the House of Lords, others were standing for Parliament. I think
the weakness is that they never set out to give it the—.
It was not the first call on people's time.
Q718 Alun Michael: So it is the role
of the Assembly rather than the role of the Mayor?
Ken Livingstone: If you ever get
a mayor that takes an extreme ideological and divisive role or
was a bit dubious financially, the Assembly really come into their
own and that is when they grind the mayor down and bring them
down. It is very difficult when you have got a broad consensus
that covers 90% of political policy, most of green policy and
quite a chunk of Liberal and Tory policy tacked on to the Labour
Party. Also, looking at legislation, I would go back to saying
it should be your primary job, not one you tack on to something
else you are doing. I think that is part of the reason it has
never got into the public consciousness. I was on the GLC, where
you were paid just your attendance allowance, about £2,000
a year. I was in there all the hours God sent because I loved
it and I was stirring up trouble all over London. Assembly members:
a lot get incorporated into the Mayor's administration, and that
may be wrong actually, being part of the administration and supposedly
having a scrutiny role, but it is very difficult to see people
not having other major outside interests until they are given
more to do, which is why it seems to me absolutely ridiculous
that the by-law on pigeons in London ended up being determined
by the Government of the day. All those sorts of things do seem
to me should be devolved.
Q719 Alun Michael: That is helpful.
One of the questions is the relationship to the boroughs. You
have seen this in two contexts, because, obviously, you saw it
in the old GLA situation and you have seen it now as Mayor of
London. What is the relationship to the boroughs like?
Ken Livingstone: In the public
domain it looks very hostile. I have to say, behind the scenes
there is much closer collaboration. There are things we are not
going to agree on and we will denounce each other, but, say, in
2006, when the Conservatives gained many London boroughs, some
of those borough leaders were in my door so quick saying, "How
can we work together?", and even, "Can we build more
affordable housing?", and this was not a party issue. I found
there was a Labour borough, as difficult to work with, as the
most extreme of the Tories. It is not really a Labour, Tory or
Liberal issue—those people who think the whole world should
go away and allow them to manage that borough all on its own,
it would be like a nirvana within one borough, and there are others
that recognise—. If I take Westminster Council where Simon
Milton is the leader, he knew Westminster could not do its best
if it was not working closely with the Mayor, because the Mayor's
powers were most concentrated in central London. If I take another
extreme, the Labour Council of Greenwich, it broadly had a view
that they were sufficiently far from the centre and if everyone
else could go away they could create socialism in one borough.
At the other extreme is Hillingdon. I never met the leader of
Hillingdon Council in eight years and I thought this was a terrible
snub, and then I discovered most of the Tory leaders had not met
him either! So there is a sort of insularity in some of the boroughs.
I think there are really messy areas where Londoners are not aware
who is running things. You have got 32 boroughs with different
parking policies, residential zone times, different policies relating
to bus lanes. The only roads the Mayor runs are 5%, the red routes,
and that is why you have a wonderful cycle lane going through
one borough and it stops at the borough boundary.
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