Four years after the London Mayor and Assembly were created, the first term of office for us all is coming to an end next month.
I remember four years ago, just after I was elected, Graham Tope – the Liberal Democrat Leader on the London Assembly – coming to me and asking what I wanted to do. I said transport and policing. In the blink of an eye, I found myself chair of the London Assembly’s transport committee and a member of the Metropolitan Police Authority. Two more interesting and challenging briefs I cannot imagine.
Here’s how it was for me…
Much of the work of the Assembly is to keep the Mayor and others in check by carrying out detailed scrutiny of key areas – a bit like Select Committees in Parliament. The very first scrutiny carried out by the Assembly, and the first I scoped and chaired, was my committee’s scrutiny of the proposals for a central London congestion charging scheme.
Now, despite the Mayor’s severe failure on the customer services side of the scheme, it has been successful at reducing traffic and congestion. But back then there were huge horror stories about how it would turn central London into a ghost town, circled by the gridlock to end all gridlocks around the perimeter. You would have thought world as we knew it was going to end on February 17th, 2003.
Widely praised even now as the best scrutiny of the Assembly, we did good work examining the details of the scheme. Even Derek Turner, the man who is responsible for the successful implementation of the charge, says it did much for the success of the scheme.
Other highlights on the transport committee included work on improving safety on public transport (including dumping all my fellow committee members in Leicester Square after midnight and challenging them to make it home by public transport!).
Less media-friendly, but hugely important in the long-run, was the opportunity my role gave me to push individual transport plans. I’ve been greatly impressed by these in Australia – where direct marketing to individuals of the public transport options for their most common routes has brought about big increases in public transport usage, even without having to further improve public transport. From being a strange foreign concept, they are now increasingly part and parcel of the transport debate in the capital.
And of course most recently there was our report into speed humps. A lively topic that! And so many more issues – far more than I can put into this column.
On all these issues, and many others, I think a key criteria on which Assembly members (including myself) should be judged is how well or badly we’ve used the access being on the GLA gives you to raise those questions people so often get frustrated about.
Like why is it so difficult so often to contact the police? Well, when a GLA member (me) does a survey showing that 40% of police stations with front counters don’t answer the phone – you can get the Met’s top policeman to listen.
It’s been the same with two other of my long running campaigns. In the battle to get Muswell Hill police station’s front counter reopened, there was a period when the idea seemed to stall within the police’s bureaucracy. Being on the GLA meant I could get Sir John Stevens to put a stop to that!
Similarly on the battle to get a bus route linking Muswell Hill and Swiss Cottage, you can get the ear of Transport for London’s chiefs if you’re a member of the body to which they are accountable. And that’s certainly been needed in the long battles to secure first the trial and – hopefully later this year – an expansion to a full service.
There’s been lots more, such as bus driver behaviour, tube privatisation and cleaning up stations; I’ve been hoisted up on a fireman’s lift, ridden in the cab of a London tube train, driven a double-decker bus and done tours of duty with Haringey police on a Saturday night.
I am really grateful for the opportunities I have had and perhaps a final thanks to the Ham and High for letting me and other Assembly members have a regular column – hopefully giving readers a bit more opportunity to find out what we all get up to in your name. (You can read the old columns on my website, http://www.lynne.featherstone.org).
So, how was it for you? I guess I’ll find out when the votes are counted on June 11th!
