Scrap the GLA and abolish the Mayor of London
25 years after Tony Blair created them, it’s time to admit that the Mayor and the GLA have fundamentally failed to deliver better transport, better policing and a credible growth agenda for London, says Tony Lodge
Londoners have spent the last month nervously opening their council tax bills. Readers will know it is a relatively clear document which sets out what key local services such as schools, waste collection, social services and roads will cost in the year ahead.
No one likes paying bills but most people accept that essential services have to be funded, even if they could be delivered cheaper and better. Costs vary across London’s 32 boroughs but households in two thirds of them will now pay in excess of £2000 a year in council tax. But it doesn’t stop there.
Londoners face another growing and significant financial hit which is increasingly harder to justify. They must also pay the Mayor of London and his Greater London Authority (GLA) on average an extra £500 ‘precept’ to fund Sir Sadiq Khan’s seat of power. But to what end? Have the institutions of London’s devolved government and the office of Mayor done a good job? Are they value for money?
Now, 25 years after Tony Blair created them, isn’t it time to look again and conclude that the Mayor of London and the GLA have fundamentally failed to deliver better transport, better policing and a credible growth agenda for London? These are critical questions especially when there is growing evidence that the experiment with London government hasn’t worked. Is London safer than it was? Is the tube affordable? Are the right kind of homes being built to tackle the city’s affordability crisis in the right places? Is the valuable night economy getting the support it needs?
What does Sadiq Khan actually do?
The Mayor is the Chair of Transport for London (TfL). It is responsible for the capital’s underground, buses and roads. At the end of 2023 it shouldered a £12.9bn debt and the tube is now the most expensive in the world. It suffers out of date working practices resulting from the Mayor’s consistent refusal to cross trade union red lines and embrace new technology. Fare evasion is rampant and ignored, costing the network and passengers £130m a year. I asked TfL staff at Hammersmith last month about evasion and they estimated that ten per cent of all daily passenger flows were fare dodgers, in full view of staff. They said that TfL management didn’t seem to care and they’ve been told not to intervene. Similarly, how many tube ‘help points’ don’t work or go unanswered, leaving passengers vulnerable to growing incidents of crime and violence?
Sir Sadiq Khan heads the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime and the London Policing Board. The crime wave in the capital is truly dire with confidence and trust in the Met police at an all-time low, far lower than when Khan took office. The force has only recently been released from ‘special measures’ and incidents of knife crime appear out of control. The Mayor must also take responsibility for poor police morale; new cuts to Scotland Yard numbers and no less than four different Met Commissioners since he took office. Do London’s bobbies think the Mayor has their back when they risk their lives on a daily basis? How does this trepidation affect the Met’s performance and effectiveness, not to mention the Mayor’s refusal to block divisive ‘hate’ marches which place a huge strain on police resources.
Forty years ago a Conservative government passed laws to abolish the failed, expensive and discredited Greater London Council (GLC). It had become a fiefdom for political gimmicks, egos and wasteful policy. Ultimately, it was rightly deemed unnecessary; its powers could be and were better carried out by London’s boroughs and the government.
Haven’t we reached the same milestone after 25 years of the Mayor and the GLA? It is surely time for a grown-up conversation to examine how an ambition which started out with such hope and political investment has become a grim failure of governance, waste and bureaucracy.
Even Labour council leaders have this month called for a formal say in how the Mayor makes decisions, arguing his system is “holding London back” with too much power with one person. For GLA see GLC; but who will have the political courage to say that this latest attempt to create yet another tier of London government has so clearly failed?
Tony Lodge is a research fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies