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Greater London Authority Bill

I apologise again to the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, for intervening again before he responds. My noble friend’s suggestion that there will be a strange period in the fifth year when legitimacy will drain away is altered by the fact that the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, has had the sense to bring the issue forward in advance of the elections in 2008, so that the people of London will know the terms on which they are electing a Mayor at that time. I expect that the people of London could easily judge that they had been asked to elect someone for a five-year term as opposed to a four-year term—or indeed, for three years, if an alternative was proposed. The situation regarding the changing date for the GLC was slightly different; that was in the run-up to abolition, when the behaviour of politicians is slightly different from their behaviour just before an election that has been scheduled but is simply deferred.