Comments on the Green Paper on the Greater London Authority

Dear Deputy Prime Minister

I feel it is a pity you make your starting point that you are not creating another GLC. The reason that calls for regional government are strong in London is because most Londoners regarded the removal of the GLC as a great injustice and any new proposal will be compared with what we once had.

Of course we can do better than the GLC. I would not want to see a new GLA claw back powers of the GLC which were given to the Boroughs. And the lack of proportional representation was a big fault. However what seems to be on offer seems far less than we had before.

Directly elected Mayor

I am fundamentally opposed to a directly elected mayor. First it can not be elected by proportional representation. Unless he has a split personality he can only represent one view. He can not speak for all London for he can not speak for those who disagree with him and so making him the voice of London makes those who disagree with him voiceless.

Directly electing a single leader undermines the democratic spirit. By democratic spirit I mean the feeling amongst citizens that they take direct responsibility for what is done in their name. Hence they vote primarily for policies and the duty of those they elect is to do their will by sorting out the details while carrying out their wishes. The directly elected mayor will tend to stand not on policies but personality. As such there is a danger the mayor will be someone above politics, a man trying to act as a saviour rather than a servant to do the voters bidding.

The personality of the mayor will be crucial. I am not confident in judging the personality of people I know - to judge someone, reliably, by their media personality is next to impossible. Parties have to stand on their record. Voters can punish parties that seem to have a culture of sleaze and so parties will tend to compete in keeping potentially corrupt members in line.

No one can be an all rounder. The mayor will have specific areas that he/she knows more about while other areas will be left in the hands of supposedly neutral administrators. In areas that are not the prime interest of the mayor these Sir Humphreys will call the shots and there supposed neutrality will just be an insulation against unaccountability. The strength of the system of sub committees that is normal in local government is that each sub-committee will be composed of those primarily interested in the are of concern of that committee. Such people are more likely to keep the administrators on their toes than a mayor whose attention is divided amongst many topics

Electoral Systems

If there must be a mayor then they should be elected by a Condorcet criterion method. I will explain. Voters using these methods vote as if by alternative vote. At the count every candidate is run against every other. Hence the counting is a series of two candidate contests where the winner is the candidate who had more voters putting them as higher preference than the other. If there ends up one candidate who beats all the others they are the winner. It is possible that there might be a situation where A beats B who beats C who beats A. If that happens there needs to be some form of tie breaker to decide the winner in such an inner circle. (There are several methods of tie breaking which is why I refer to Condorcet criterion methods rather than method)

The advantage of these methods are for voters faced with a situation where there is one candidate they like, one who is OK and one who they think is awful. Imagine this voter suspects that the simply OK candidate is best chance of stopping the awful one. Under alternative vote such a voter is in a real dilemma because if they give a high preference to their preferred choice so making it more likely that the OK candidate is eliminated early then there is a danger that the awful candidate might win. If one imagines an election with a left, a centre and a right candidate one can see how such a situation could arise in the real world.

Of course there is some extra work in counting but I think you should at least seriously consider this option.

Electing the assembly must be by proportional representation to ensure that the assembly genuinely reflects opinion in London. To get a reasonably proportional result requires constituencies of ten or more. Given that this will mean very large constituencies, then we might as well go the whole way and treat London as one large constituency.

Pure STV would be unworkable at this size of constituency so really I'm advocating list PR. But the order that candidates are drawn from the list should be determined by the voters. Laying down that voters vote for a list by voting for a candidate on that list and using these personal votes to determine the order that candidates from a list are elected is a workable if crude method.

Clearly there should be strict limiting of funding and this should apply at an all-London level not just for individual candidates.

London Transport Authority

First of all this should consist entirely of members nominated by the Assembly in way that the reflects the balance of opinion in the Assembly. Whether they are actually members of the assembly or are transport experts or perhaps campaigners from outside the assembly is not important as long as they politically reflect the views of Londoners. Otherwise there is a danger that the LTA will simply be a quango that will ignore the wishes of Londoners. Of course the voters will vote for the assembly with other issues in mind than transport so direct election of the LTA should be considered.

There must be the option for the Assembly to raise revenue to finance transport in the capital. Tax raising powers on the Scottish model are an obvious option but the authority should have a range of options. The authority should have the option of taxing road use, whether the crude method of insisting users in certain areas display an additional tax disc to the more sophisticated proposals for electronic tolls which are likely to become cheap and practical in the near future.

Police Authority

One of the one clear improvements over the GLC is the Police Authority. But is undermined by making the "elected members" appointees of the mayor. The mayor may have to make his appointees reflect the party balance but it makes no sense in situations where the mayor choosing the representative of a party he is opposed or even strongly dislikes. What is the problem with choosing the elected members by an STV election from the assembly?

Yours sincerely

David Barnsdale