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Greater London Authority Bill

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend the Minister on coming forward with this proposal. We have not had much debate about this idea to create a statutory board in earlier stages; it is a good idea. But I still worry that, underneath the board, there will be all the boroughs and the waste disposal authorities; this creates yet another layer. The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, talked about waste disposal being a capital-intensive process, and she would agree that there are clear benefits in scale. Yet I still worry about the incentives on the boroughs. Some of their current performance leaves a lot to be desired, and they will see this as a way of receiving money from the board, allocated from the Government, to try to improve what they do at the moment—or, more likely, to cut their own contributions while hoping that the money comes from either the Government or the board. In other words, they would see it as a subsidy to do less themselves and get more money. This proposal is a lot better than doing nothing, which is what we were faced with before. However, I hope that somebody—maybe the Mayor, using his persuasive powers, or his successor—will finally persuade everybody that it is in their interests for London to deal with the processing and disposal of its waste as one body. I am quite convinced that that is the way to achieve more recycling and better benefits. This is a halfway stage, which is better than nothing, so I support it.