Role of the London Assembly is too important to be ignored
3 min read
James Cleverly MP writes about the role of the London Assembly as he stands down after eight years scrutinising an £11bn budget, holding the Mayor to account and delivering policing, fire & transport services.
In a few weeks time I'll be stepping down from the London Assembly after eight years as the Assembly Member for Bexley & Bromley.
Hands up who thinks they know what the London Assembly does! I doubt that many people, even the politically informed readership of this website, could really claim to understand what the Assembly does, how its members are elected and what powers it has. I didn't until I was elected a member myself.
In terms of public profile, the 25 member body is eclipsed by the Mayor of London, its members caught in the no-mans-land between MPs at the national level and councillors at the local level. The primary function of the Assembly is to scrutinise the Mayor in the same way that a select committee of MPs scrutinises government ministers. As the role of Mayor accumulates more powers, the role of keeping an eye on the use of those powers becomes more important. Transport for London, the Met Police, London Fire Brigade, regeneration schemes and the running of City Hall itself, accounts for a combined budget of over £11 Billion a year.
There has long been a question mark over the need for Assembly members, this is driven by a lack of understanding of their function and a focus on their cost. But I think 25 people scrutinising an £11bn budget looks quite frugal compared to the 60 Welsh Assembly Members scrutinising their £18bn budget or Scotland's 129 MSPs and their £32bn budget.
The London Mayoralty and Assembly was devised on the back of a fag packet during the Blair years and we've been ironing out the bugs and inconsistencies ever since. When I was first elected there was still a Government Office for London with a Minister for London duplicating much of the work of the Mayor. There was a Police Authority and a Fire Authority which were both populated with Assembly Members elected to scrutinise those functions. City Hall was built on contradictions and compromises.
Over the last eight years London government has become more mature, clearer in its mission and cleaner in its division of labour. The executive functions are now explicitly in the hands of the Mayor rather than the muddy mix that existed before. Assembly members no longer mark their own homework by holding both executive and scrutiny roles.
City Hall is far from perfect and still has a lot of evolution ahead of it, but it is no longer regarded as an irrelevance or a powerless soapbox for the Mayor. The direction of travel is now set, the Mayor's portfolio of powers and responsibilities will grow and the scrutiny function will become more important.
In May there will be a new mayor and at least eight new Assembly Members, the tone of City Hall will change, and perhaps that change will stimulate more interest. I hope that people take more notice of the work that Assembly Members do because London represents a huge proportion of the UK's GDP, has the UK's largest police force, England's largest fire service and a transport system that moves more people each day than the rest of the country's public transport system combined. It is too important a city for its government to be ignored.
James Cleverly MP is the Conservative MP for Braintree & the London Assembly Member for Bexley and Bromley
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