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Conference article: Any discussion of the Mayor’s accountability has to start with recognition of two key points.
Wednesday, 10 February 2010 12:51
by Martin Hoscik - Mayorwatch
Firstly the nature of the role of Mayor means it’s always likely to attract people who - as we’ve seen with both Ken and Boris - are sufficiently robust that negative headlines and opposition press releases alone are unlikely to dissuade them from a course of action on which they’ve already decided.
Secondly the Mayor is ‘all powerful’, the London Assembly which - in theory at least - exists to scrutinise the Mayor has virtually no ability to constrain him or her. Even the mechanism for rejecting the Mayor’s annual budget requires Assembly opponents to muster a two-thirds majority in favour of an alternative proposal rather than requiring the Mayor to build support and consensus for theirs.
When you consider the Mayor’s budget is measured in billions it’s extraordinary that a modern day government should have empowered an individual politician to decide how such large sums of public money should be spent. It’s an area which needs urgent review and I’ll come on to this shortly.
When it comes to making appointments the Mayor generally has a free hand but the departure of several high-profile advisors from Boris Johnson’s administration suggests some meaningful outside scrutiny might be in order here.
Having identified two specific areas of the Assembly’s weakness it’s important not to don’t overstate them, doing so risks aiding the ambitions of those voices who from time to time call for the body to be abolished or reformed in a way which makes it less relevant and more importantly, less accountable, to Londoners.
The tragedy however is that Assembly Members often have less opportunity to get their point of view across than those of us who write about City Hall and certainly far less chance than the Mayor.
A few honourable exceptions aside, much of the traditional media still has little understanding of the Greater London Authority as a whole and even less so of the Assembly. Coverage is still very much focused on the Mayor with Assembly Members relegated to minor players in any debate or discussion. As Mayors Livingstone and Johnson rapidly came to realise, a Mayor who gets his press release out before his critics can easily dominate the news agenda.
Some of this is part of the growing abandonment of ‘local government’ coverage but much is, I think, the result of Assembly Members being elected in the shadow of their party’s Mayoral candidate with no clear manifesto of their own and few widely recognisable figures seeking election.
One way to re-focus attention on the Assembly is to move elections for it so that they came during a Mayor’s term of office while simultaneously increasing their power of veto on Mayoral appointments and reversing the burden in the budget process so that the Mayor needed to win majority support for their plans.
These would require relatively modest changes of law, extending the term of office of a single Assembly to allow the next election to take place after the Mayoral elections.
A decade on London’s devolution settlement is far from complete and while the rest of the country may understandably not consider it a priority given the scale of the problems we currently face as a nation, reforming and strengthening the Assembly is a cause which all of us who care about democratic accountability should have no hesitation in supporting and arguing for.
