While the Mayor’s away, the Assembly will play!

Whilst Ken Livingstone was away in Moscow checking why they have a tube system that runs beautifully and we don’t, it’s been all change at the London Assembly.

The hot news is that Tories have dumped their leader of the last two years, Bob Neill, and elected in the blue corner Eric Ollerenshaw of Hackney Tories as their guiding light. The Conservatives have been deeply split over whether to participate constructively in the work of the Assembly or whether to sit on the sidelines in opposition to everything. It will be interesting to see how the change in leader affects this.

Other hot news – the Liberal Democrat group has turned down the Mayor’s offer of the deputy mayor post. Our job is to keep an eye on him – and that is better done from an independent position. It would have been nice – but just not practicable.

Meanwhile, myself (Chair of Transport Policy) and John Biggs (Chair of Transport Operations, Labour) have avoided pistols at dawn to decide which of us would chair the new single Transport Committee. We have compromised on doing a year each as chair and a year as vice-chair over the next two years.

The reason for the change in transport committees is that the Assembly has reorganised and restructured – yet again! The changes are designed to make us work more like the Parliamentary Select Committees, with standing committees on all the key areas: health, public services, environment, transport, economic development and so on.

The Assembly’s AGM last week ratified these changes. The day began strangely when my Ham & High co-columnist and GLA Tory member, Brian Coleman, kissed me (on the cheek) and congratulated me on the Liberal Democrats’ result in the local elections in Haringey.

It was the second biggest gain of LibDem seats in the country, but given that this had resulted in Haringey becoming a Tory free zone, I was surprised by his warmth of his salutations! Perhaps he was just in a very good mood because of his own result in Barnet.

Anyway – there had been an absolute furore of rumours ricocheting around the GLA preceding the meeting – that the Tories might ‘go into opposition’ at the AGM. The idea of ‘opposition’ on a scrutiny body always seemed a bizarre concept, as it was not clear (even to them) whom they planned to oppose. Did they want to oppose the rest of the Assembly? Did they want to oppose the Mayor? Or indeed, did they just want to oppose anything and everything?

As a scrutiny body with no executive power, the only way to deliver for London and work successfully on the Assembly is to produce cross-party recommendations from investigative committees that result in action and improvements. Improvements can be effected either by scrutinising the Mayor’s proposals and policies to improve them or by taking an issue of importance to London and shining a spotlight on it and pointing the way forward.

We never did find out what the Tories meant by opposition as, in the event, this all evaporated into nothing except their change of leader.

So the changes were rung in – and off we go into the third year of our term of office. It sure goes quickly.

I am not usually a great fan of re-structuring and tend to think it’s what people do when they want to distract you from their lack of results. However,in this case I have to say that the Assembly, although hugely overshadowed by Mayor Livingstone, has produced some very good work over the last two years. In fact, I think the Assembly has done its job somewhat better than the Mayor has done his. It’s just such a shame that he has all the executive power and we have none!

I’m not speaking to Ken. Whether he can’t sleep nights because of this, I don’t know!

But what a wimp he is turning out to be when London really needs him – when the chips are down.

At Mayor’s question time last week I called on him to rally the people of London in a mass lobby of Parliament on St George’s day, April 23. We never quite know what to do with our national day in England with respectable national pride often seeming to be squeezed out by the drunken violence of so-called football fans or the nostalgic xenophobia of those whose pride in our country extends no further than reminiscing about bombing Germany.

London’s underground system should be a source of national pride. As with so many public services, our forbearers led the way in their construction and bequeathed us with a infrastructure of trains, tunnels, sewers and so much more that was the envy of many other countries. In an ironic historical twist, the first chairman and managing director of London Transport was Albert Stanley – an American brought in because of his successful track record in the US. Sounds familiar?

But there’s little to be envious now of the state of the tube. And other countries certainly aren’t looking to copy Labour’s plans to break-up and privatise the Tube. This isn’t just a transitory issue, a chance for a bit of political swordplay. If PPP goes ahead it will determine the fate of our Tube system for the next thirty years. Just imagine, if Ted Heath had cooked up a similar scheme and signed contracts when he was Prime Minister we would only now be coming to the end of them.

And, of course, with the local elections upon us on the 2nd May – a time when a mass movement of people against the Labour government generally carries more weight than usual. Labour is sensitive to very little – except in the ballot box!

So, where does Ken stand? He says he is opposed to PPP but when it comes to sending Labour the only sort of message they listen to – in the ballot box, he wriggles and squirms.

I remember only too well last year when the General Election presented an opportunity to make the point, Tony Blair made Bob Kiley take the Chair of London Underground ‘to show willing’ – and effectively killed the issue during the election. Two minutes after the election was in the bag for Labour – the whole thing fell apart and Mr Kiley was unceremoniously out of the job and PPP was roaring ahead again.

If it was a Conservative government, would Ken really be so shy of urging people to vote against PPP in the ballot box? Of course not. But he still can’t quite tearing himself away from flirting with Labour and never quite being willing to stand up and be counted when it really matters.

Last week at Mayor’s cabinet, Ken Livingstone made an extraordinary statement. He said that he believed that government ministers Stephen Byers, Nick Raynsford and John Spellar supported the PPP plans to partially-privatise the Tube because they were being misbriefed by their civil servants. Poor little innocents!

Oh please! These three grown men, Ministers of State of the United Kingdom, are supposed to be running the country- and Ken sat there making excuses for them. They have at their disposal all the resources available to the machinery of Government to find the truth.

They have no excuse for not knowing how badly flawed their privatisation plans are. The government hasn’t just failed to persuade transport experts, the public and Bob Kiley that the plans make sense. The government has even failed to persuade the Labour MPs on the Transport Select Committee. The reality is that PPP is not safe, not cheap and not wanted.

Even the Ernst and Young report, commissioned to examine value for money by the Government itself, says that the calculation they make is ‘part art, part science’. And that report only concludes that privatisation offers value for money by assuming the public sector would get nearly everything wrong and the private sector would get nearly everything right. Yes, that’s the same private sector that has brought up Marconi, Equitable Life and Railtrack.

It is highly implausible that the private sector would really perform better than the public sector in this case, especially as the public sector has on its side Bob Kiley, a man with a proven track record of turning round other failing public transport systems.

So it is no wonder the government is so reluctant to hand over information about the details of the contracts. After promising on TV to give the Mayor the details of the profits private companies would be allowed to make from the Tube, Stephen Byers did duly deliver the documents – but with the key numbers missing and replaced with asterisks!

These and other contract details are being kept secret because changes were still being made to the contracts as the private companies get colder and colder feet about accepting any risk transfer at all. It is such an unbelievably bad deal, that I keep hoping against hope that the cavalry will somehow appear and save us at the 11th hour. Sadly, there is no cavalry!

And all that stands between London and the PPP now is Ken. And that is why Ken needs to get tougher. Kowtowing to Labour and making excuses for government ministers is not going to get us anywhere. There isn’t much hope left – but the Mayor of London must go as far as it is possible to go to stop privatisation.

Labour, meanwhile, hope and pray that London is fed up with this row, and is growing impatient and simply wants to get on with it. But given that by Kiley and Ken’s account, the contracts now deliver virtually nothing to London in terms of benefits in the first decade – what’s to delay? Ken went soft on the Government over PPP during the General Election and refused to use it against Labour then.

He has another opportunity coming soon. Will he help make Labour pay the political price this time through the ballot box in the London council elections on May 2? When push has come to shove, Mayor Livingstone so far hasn’t been willing to truly stand up for London against Labour. The umbilical chord always proves to be too strong for that final cut.

The father of the youngest witness ever to give evidence to the London Assembly to date equated graffiti to the spraying of tomcats. I don’t know if he was suggesting neutering for our young male population – but it’s a thought!

The 14-year-old boy was terrific, and of course, he only used legal walls and decorated his schoolbooks with ‘tags’. For the uninitiated, a tag is a kind of logo of your chosen brand name for yourself, with the idea being to spray it on as many places as possible so it can be seen by as many of your graffiti peers as possible. To the eye of the graffer these are works of art and beauty. A ‘legal wall,’ used in some areas, is a surface for use by graffiti artists and sometimes supervised as a community project. Of course, as part of the point of making your mark is to be anti-establishment, a lot of taggers sneer at a legal wall.

To some, it may be a work of art – but to me it just looks like a mess. Pillar boxes, walls, fences, utility boxes, shop fronts, viaducts, railway walls – it’s everywhere now – rich and poor neighbourhoods alike – graffiti knows no boundaries. And now the windows of our buses, tubes and trains are also etched with graffiti – expensive to replace and no means of painting it over or cleaning it off. So how do we deal with this epidemic of graffiti and clash of desires between those who want to live in clean neighbourhoods and those who want to leave their mark?

At the London Assembly, I am on an investigative panel looking at this challenge. The level of resources and the political will that different boroughs commit to dealing with graffiti varies hugely from £15,000 to £600,000 per annum across London. The political will goes hand in hand with the money. The solutions emerging from our scrutiny combine a range of best practice from different boroughs -from improving youth facilities, providing legal walls, having a policy of instant removal, supplying cleaning materials free to volunteers in the community, having a clear enforcement regime for those caught (it is a crime), involving parents and so on. There are many things that can be done and we will be disseminating our findings in due course.

One thing we found from New York’s experience on the subway was that instant removal took away the point for the taggers. In my own dear borough of Haringey, however, graffiti usually remains in place for months, if not years or even decades – thus encouraging others to join in with their own tags. Graffiti is only removed promptly if it is racist or obscene – rarely otherwise. Recently, there has been a huge rise in reports of graffiti and so I have been putting together an information sheet for my local area on how to get graffiti removed and who can do it, etc. Local residents, knowing my abiding interest in graffiti,started reporting to me sightings of a mystery woman removing graffiti in the Highgate area from walls, fences and utility boxes. Three cheers I thought – power to the people.

Last week my sister telephoned me to say that she had had a brilliant idea – why didn’t councils train volunteers to clean off graffiti themselves? She then told me that the idea had struck her when she was out cleaning graffiti of utility and post boxes the week before. So that’s who the mystery woman was – my own sister!

But if it is my sister who is cleaning the utility boxes, who is the other woman who is cleaning it off the walls and fences? Whoever they are, they are demonstrating how effectively we can make a difference in our communities when we put our minds to it. So thank you sister and thank you other mystery woman.

What’s wrong with South West Trains (SWT)? It would take more than one column to answer that! But their latest trick is to try to dodge any public scrutiny over their role in the outbreak of train strikes.

Last week, the London Assembly held a special meeting to question both SWT and the unions over the threatened rail strikes. London is sick of strikes. Over the past couple of years they seem to be on the agenda again – both on the Tube and on the railways. Is it Ken? Does he make unions feel striking is OK again? Or is it having a Labour government, which prefers spinning to substance?

Either way, strikes are the last thing us poor long-suffering travelling public need to add to our transport woes. The Assembly rightly decided it should invite both parties in and we should question them in public on behalf of Londoners.

Well! It was a good idea but as I said at the beginning, SWT didn’t want to come and play. And that’s a shame, because it was a good session. The RMT turned up in the form of Vernon Hince to present their side of the argument. I felt we got to the bottom of the RMT’s position. We heard the scale of the problems they feel they face, with the pay for drivers approaching treble the amount for guards, with a serious skills shortage and with twenty odd different train companies offering different rates and creating a ‘market’ of pay rates which simply leapfrogged all over the place. All problems that need tackling. It all sounded very reasonable.

I’m sure this is not a view SWT would share. But sadly they wouldn’t share any views with us. SWT may also have had extremely good reasons for their position – but we will never know as they refused to turn up. Even worse in a way, they actually said they were happy to come and talk to us in private, but not in public session. Sally Hamwee, Chair of the Assembly, rightly told them where to go with that offer. SWT is meant to run a public service, for the benefit of Londoners. They should be willing to stand up in public and defend their record – not creep around in private meetings.

SWT only exist because they have been given a franchise to run a public service, but they seem reluctant to acknowledge this and the responsibilities that go with this. The offer SWT was given was a good one – not to exchange a series of soundbites with the RMT but for an hour-long session with both parties able to rebut or agree the other.

This is part of a general malaise in public life, with companies flinching away from public exposure. How many times have we heard the tired old excuse about "commercial confidentiality" be used to hide away the details of contracts? There is a role for genuine commercial confidentiality – just as there is a role for private talks in resolving strikes – but the overwhelming presumption must be in favour of openness and accountability, not comfortable secrecy.

The good news in the end is that the imminent strike was cancelled but two more are in train. At least they have agreed to go to arbitration – but will it be binding?

My own preferred solution would be to bang both parties heads together, then put them in a room together with a TV camera in on them, and broadcast those ‘discussions’ live to London. And if one of them doesn’t turn up? Well, we could borrow a trick from Have I Got News For You and replace them with a tub of lard. How about it SWT?

I just came back from buying Sunday croissant at my local corner shop. The owner and two of the guys who work there were discussing whether or not the Bin Laden “confession” video was genuine. Their view seemed to be not. Drawing me into the discussion, there appeared to be two theories as to why it could not be genuine.

The first was Bin Laden’s profile – which apparently is straight on the video but according to one of the guys is quite different in reality. The other theorist proposed that there was a multi-million pound deal being offered to Afghanistan for mini-bourkhas following the predicted change in regime and that was the rational for the American involvement in the region. A faked video was being used as a cover for American commercial self-interest.

I have no pukka information that could guide me as to whether or not the video is genuine. I am from the West and therefore my presumption is that it is genuine – even though there is a tiny thought at the back of my brain that says: ‘it’s a bit convenient having a video showing Bin Laden admitting guilt’. But, for the most part it is swept away because I, like most of the West and regardless of the validity or otherwise of the video, believe that Bin Laden is responsible for September 11 and therefore justice must be sought.

Anyway, the point of relating this is – given that we are in that wonderful pocket of time between Xmas and New year, stomachs are full, the hangovers are receding, the children (if we have them) are preoccupied with the outrageous amount of money we have all spent on them, whether we can afford it or no – there is, for once, time to think a bit.

And I am a great believer in thinking, albeit pondering the great imponderables doesn’t appear very fashionable these days. This conversation with my mates in the corner shop simply brought sharply into focus for me how clearly we are all products of our upbringing – both personal and national. If we are ever to resolve issues, be they personal, local, national or international, the only real solutions come from allowing us all positions that are tenable given our own starting point and this means we have to be able to think beyond our initial preconceptions.

So where does this mean for my day job? What has Bin Laden got to do with London government? Only this. People often ask me what is the point of the Assembly? (There are days when this question seems more valid than others!) What is its role?

For me the answer is simple. If a policy, be it from the Mayor or the Government or whoever, is examined by the Assembly, and then all parties on the Assembly can agree a response, this response will not only benefit London because of what it says, but also because the very act of having to come up with cross-party agreement means the result is robust and tenable to all.

This is the value in the work the Assembly does. It isn’t always headline catching. It isn’t always sexy, but it produces work that stands full square for London across its entire people because it is forged through debate, crossfire and heat to reach a position of agreement.

So as the New Year approaches I suppose my own resolution for 2002 will be to try even harder to understand others perspective on issues which come to me on the Assembly and to remember that just ‘cos I believe I am right, so others believe they are right – and we need to reach across the differences to find a way through for us all.

Happy New Year!