Greater London Authority Act 2007

Written submission from Professor Tony Travers (GLA 09)

Greater London Authority (2007) Act

1. Changes made to London government in 2007

This memorandum is a response to the Communities and Local Government Committee’s request for evidence in respect of its inquiry into the impact of the Greater London Authority (2007) Act. The Committee has summarised the purposes of the 2007 legislation as follows:

· providing the London Assembly with extra powers and an independent budget;

· establishing the London Board within the Homes and Communities Agency (at that time the Housing Corporation);

· establishing the London Skills and Employment Board;

· allowing the Mayor a freer hand in making appointments to a number of functional bodies, including Transport for London ;

· requiring the creation of plans and strategies in a number of policy areas;

· allowing the Mayor a greater role in determining planning applications which he judged to have strategic importance.

Another key change was:

· the establishment of a new London Waste and Recycling Board.

2. The government’s assessment

The government’s memorandum on the subject [1] is luke-warm in its judgement of the success of the 2007 changes. However, it sees the planning changes as broadly positive, stating: "Insofar as the approval of planning decisions can be read as furthering economic development, then the power has had a beneficial effect on London’s overall social and economic development. It may also be the case that the Mayor’s initial uses of the powers may have persuaded boroughs to take a more positive view of development applications in order to avoid mayoral intervention, providing a further boost to the city’s economy…". Other changes are judged to have had limited impact and some (notably in relation to housing) have been superseded.

The 2007 Act was indeed of modest intent. Subsequent changes made in 2011 affected housing, economic development, policing and Royal Parks, though these, also, were of limited scope. The reforms of 2007 and 2011 contributed to a small extension of the Greater London Authority’s powers. Neither of the reforms were a radical further step in the direction of devolution to London.

3. Impact of the 2007 Act

The current government is broadly correct in its assessment of the 2007 Act. The new planning provisions shifted the balance of power over major developments towards the Mayor and away from the boroughs. But the change only affected a limited number of larger developments. Given the pressure for development in London, boroughs will inevitably come under pressure from local residents to reduce the number and scale of big projects. As in any large city, city-wide requirements must be set against those of neighbourhoods. From time to time the mayor will have to overrule boroughs in the whole city’s interests. At a time of sharp development pressure and within wider English planning policies which seek to protect green land, this reform was probably justified. There is little, if any, pressure to reverse this reform.

The other changes made, concerning matters such as confirmatory hearings by the Assembly and the creation of new waste and skills boards, have had, at best, modest impacts. It would be difficult to point to any particular subsequent policy impacts and attribute them directly to the 2007 Act. However, the new housing powers paved the way for the 2011 reforms. Taken together, this pair of changes gave the Mayor of London a bigger city-wide role in the delivery of housing.

4. Conclusions

Post-legislative scrutiny would suggest the 2007 reforms delivered a modest further devolution of power to the Greater London Authority. But these changes, like those enacted in 2011, failed to address a number of key problems with the original legislation which need to be tackled in the future. In addition, devolution has been far less radical in London than in Scotland and Wales and shows few signs of following these nations towards more extensive powers. The most important of the outstanding problems facing the GLA are as follows:

· the Mayor’s formal relationships (eg, the appointment of boards and responsibility for setting policy) with the institutions that deliver services (transport, police, fire & emergencies) are inconsistent and hard for the public to understand;

· the Mayor has a number of weak powers where his/her capacity to act is very limited, for example, over skills, public health and waste;

· the Assembly’s powers to act as a legislative body (a role consistent with the ‘American’ mayoral model in use in London) is weak;

· there are unresolved problems in relation to the appointment of ‘political executives’ to the Mayor’s Office, a process which is very different from the traditional, non-political’, way of appointing civil servants and local government officers

· there are issues associated with the ‘sudden death’ nature of power changes in the London mayoralty. Building a new executive within hours of a change of mayor causes a challenge for the new office holder;

· there are challenges associated with the use of a single executive for many of the key functions of the Mayor and Assembly, whose functions are adversarial.

In addition, though not a problem in relation to the current operation of City Hall, it is worth noting that, in the context of further devolution to Edinburgh and Cardiff,

· the GLA has far fewer responsibilities than the governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland;

· the Mayor has little fiscal autonomy.

There will probably, in the relatively near future, need to be a fuller review of the operation of the GLA and, indeed, of its relationships with the London boroughs. Moreover, the progress of devolution to Scotland and Wales has implications for the governance of London and of city regions elsewhere in England.

February 2013