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Localism Bill

My Lords, this is important. We do not believe that it is necessary to prescribe in statute the requirement on the Greater London Authority to establish a London housing and regeneration board. The letter of July 2010, to which others have referred, assumed a decision-making board. However, there were concerns over accountability. I will come further on to that. The noble Lord, Lord Palmer, put the case very well. For the benefit of noble Lords who might not have picked up the letter that I wrote following the withdrawal of the amendments last time, I should say that we believe that setting a board in statute would give London minimal flexibility in determining its own arrangements for governing housing and regeneration activities. We want to keep prescription by central government to a minimum and ensure that the Greater London Authority is free to respond to changing times and circumstances without having to resort to changing primary legislation to do so. The Mayor of London, the Assembly and London Councils are already deciding how they want to run things. They are already in the process of change, without any input from the Government. They are able to set up a board structure such as the amendment suggests—should they want to. They do not have to wait for us to tell them how to do it, they can do it themselves. I think that is one of the main reasons why we do not particularly want to put this on to the statute book. They can do it, they are able to do it, so there is no reason to tell them to do it, and they do do it. A decision-making board will ultimately determine the GLA’s housing and regeneration activities, but the GLA was created on a model of a democratically elected executive mayor to provide strong leadership and do things on behalf of London. Therefore it is important that the mayor has the final decision on housing and regeneration matters, but he has to take into account the views of the boroughs as well. Of course, the checks and balances on the mayor should remain with the London Assembly, which is there to hold the mayor to account. We do not think that it is a good thing to put the mayor in the position of having to have a board. We are absolutely clear that he is working very co-operatively with London Councils and the local government group. Therefore I think that we would resist very much putting that on to the face of the Bill. In light of what I said in my letter and what I have said today, I ask the noble Lord, Lord Palmer, to withdraw his Amendment.