What makes good government?

Written by Sally Hamwee and published in House magazine on Mon 1st Sep 2003

Each part of the UK's devolved government can learn from the others, and among the things I most admire and envy in the Scottish Parliament are their education programme, and the Presiding Officer's red button which allows him to cut off a speaker who exceeds the allotted time.

A new government must aim to be good government, and one of the benchmarks of success in my book is engagement with its citizens. Citizens come in all ages, and the more we can counter the message that young people hear so much - "Oh, politicians, they're all the same" (with the implication, "and they're all on a gravy train, and generally bad") - the better. The Scottish Parliament makes itself very accessible to young people; and I enjoyed the observation by a young visitor on its website message board: "A debate is when one person stands up and says what he thinks and then the next stands up and says what he thinks" - must have been a bad day.

The Greater London Authority has a wonderful chamber, and we are in a fascinating building, so attracting visitors is not a problem. And we are expanding our schools visits as part of a wider programme to reach out to all Londoners. The Assembly has held two successful environmental youth conferences, and I applaud the Mayor holding special question times to enable young people to sit in the members' seats and put their own questions to him. (Never one to let an opportunity go by, he used the last of these events to articulate his views on George Bush - "a worse regime than Saddam's" - and get no little media coverage.)

But a big red button wouldn't work - though the Assembly Members and the Mayor have difficulty seeing and hearing one another, the chamber has been designed so that the public can hear us so distinctly that they can pretty well catch what we're thinking. Can transparency go too far?

The Assembly is a part of the Greater London Authority, elected for the first time in 2000. We have the statutory duty of keeping under review the exercise by the Mayor of his functions, with a useful power to investigate matters which we consider to be important to Greater London. W also have a non-statutory enthusiasm to act as a critical friend to the executive arm of the GLA, the Mayor; whether criticism or friendship is the real target also depends, to some extent, on who you are.

I had not realised just how hard it would be to balance competing concerns. We are in the unusual position of having a Mayor who is not a member of a political party, though his relationship with one party - or some members of it - is much closer than with others, and members who come from four parties (9 Conservative, 9 Labour, 4 Lib Dems and 3 Greens). Those who have been members of NOC councils will know that each party is continually honing its comments on the relationships between the others, and that all have, all the time, at least one eye on party politics. The Assembly received particular praise for an early report on the (then) proposed congestion charging scheme, a successful piece of work because the concerns of the scheme's supporters to ensure the best possible scheme, and of its opponents to pick holes in it, happily coincided.

That report scored well too in the eyes too of those who say that scrutiny is not successful unless it achieves a degree of media coverage. That's not a view I fully share, but I understand it. If the big issue in politics today is civic engagement, it's no use doing great work if the citizens don't know about it; or, as a member put it, media coverage is an external audit of the relevance of scrutiny.

Without shared objectives, it is hard to achieve the best. At Mayor's Question Time (two and a half hours every month, as well as a good many other public sessions) questioning sometimes takes off, with members following up on others' points without regard to party. But we're still so new that anxiety to get a proportional amount of "air time" puts artificial constraints on the process. And as for how to ensure that Question Time promotes the scrutiny body rather than providing a convenient platform for the executive - well it would take a less articulate Mayor than we have now, not a one-man walking PR machine.

I'm bound to say that MQTs are becoming less jovial and more adversarial as we get closer to the second election. No bad thing, perhaps - I've always thought that the less the Mayor enjoys being questioned by the Assembly, then the better we are succeeding in holding him to account. The Mayor has yet to promise fireworks for the New Year, but I guess that the political fireworks will become noisier the closer we are to June 10.

Of course, if you're the focus of scrutiny you may never admit to its being successful. Now that the Assembly has the experience of a series of sessions with the same people (including those at the top of the transport and police services), I hope we can explore the benefits of scrutinising the development and implementation of policies with which we agree. It must be uncomfortable being questioned, but not all questioning is hostile. In this new world of scrutiny, one of our tasks must be to convince the scrutinised that sometimes we want them to provide us with ammunition to help promote what they are doing, not to destroy it.

I am particularly proud of the work the Liberal Democrat group (the others are Graham Tope, Lynne Featherstone and Mike Tuffrey) has done on monitoring the Mayor's spending. We have probed, challenged and questioned, brought information into the public domain and forced the Mayor to take public accounting seriously.

As for the issues that have dominated the past year. Congestion charging can be summed up as: scheme a success, budget and enforcement a dog's dinner. Concerns about security are prominent in the minds of Londoners, while the arguments rumble on over the deployment of police. And we will go on trying to get TfL to explain how they are going to plug the £600m funding gap that faces London in four or five years, even before the Mayor took over the Tube. (The answer apparently is: Keep on at central government, because if they think I have a Plan B they won't cough up. But having said that, for those who think it serves London right, I'll remind you that the capital contributes £22 bn a year to the rest of the UK.)

And the link between the Tube and congestion charging? On the former, the Mayor went to court to argue that public interest required the disclosure by central government of its deals with the PPP consortia. On the latter, in response to our arguing the public interest in the performance measures that Capita has to meet, he has been defending the confidentiality provisions in its contract.

So what do the majority of stakeholders (horrid word), the public think of it so far? Well, for most, what matters is executive action getting better and better, day by day. We may not get the credit, and we will never know whether the Mayor or his officials stop and think: I'd better not do that; the Assembly will give me hell. But I won't forget the advice of the Chief Executive over a Mayoral reply: Put that in your handbag. You never know when it may come in useful.

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