London. A world city, of that there is no doubt. Not only is it the biggest city in Britain and Europe, occupying over 620 square miles and home to over seven million people, but its £80bn in taxes supports the whole of the UK, making a substantial net contribution to the Exchequer. Clearly, then, running a metropolis this size is no easy feat.

Londoners have seen many systems of governance come and go over the years, but for the past eight, they have looked to their mayor and 25 elected Assembly members to provide strategic guidance and direction from City Hall on the banks of the Thames. Not to everyone’s taste it may be, but the building and the surrounding ‘More London’ office development are perhaps good examples of London’s urban renaissance, a signal of the collective determination which exists amongst Londoners to maintain the capital’s position as a truly global hub.

Baroness Sally Hamwee, the chair of the Assembly, has been a key player in London government for over 20 years. Appointed a life peer in 1991 and currently one of the Liberal Democrat team shadowing the Department of Communities and Local Government in the House of Lords, she is a former Richmond upon Thames councillor who has been a member of the Assembly since its inception in 2000.

“I chaired the London Planning Advisory Committee, which was one of the four London-wide bodies which was created when the GLC went, and I’ve always felt that London should have its own strategic government doing the things that aren’t covered by the boroughs,” she explains. “So it seemed the right place to go and it has been enormously interesting, being in at the creation of a new governmental institution.”

When the Assembly was established, a written agreement with Labour meant that Hamwee and Trevor Phillips agreed to share responsibility for chairing it in its first term. After a couple of alternate years in charge, Phillips opted to stand down in order to take up chairmanship of the Commission for Racial Equality. Hamwee then stepped in and chaired the Assembly until the June 2004 GLA elections. The results of those elections saw the Tories and Lib Dems enter into a similar agreement as the one which existed previously. Hamwee chaired the Assembly between May 2005 and May 2006, and for the final year of this term from May last year. As part of the agreement, when not chairing the Assembly she chaired the budget committee.

“I would think that probably those of us who have been in at the start have had some impact on the culture of the organisation which will continue on,” she observes, before adding, rather sadly, that her hopes have not always been fulfilled. “I must say my views on what the Assembly can achieve have changed over the years.” In what way? “I used, naively, to be much more hopeful about the ability of the Assembly to be consensual on a cross-party basis and not to use it as yet another party political talking shop or tool,” she replies. “I thought it would not be used to knock one another but to do the job of scrutinising the mayor. Sometimes we achieve this, but other times it is used to knock one another. But it is naïve to think that party politicians are going to lay off one another and focus purely on the executive because clearly that just doesn’t happen.”

The job of the Assembly is both to scrutinise the mayor and to investigate matters of importance to London – Hamwee likens it to the work of a select committee. Of course, since the Assembly and Mayor Livingstone started work, there have been numerous incidents and episodes of massive national and international importance. Take the congestion charge, something that had never been attempted in Europe, but is now increasingly been viewed by other cities as the way forward for controlling traffic.

“When this was first mooted those of us who at the time were in favour and those who thought it was a terrible idea had a commonality of interest,” recalls Hamwee. “It was an unholy alliance. Those in favour wanted to make sure there weren’t flaws in it, so it could succeed, so they were looking for the problems, and those who were against it were looking for the problems in order to undermine it. But actually it brought everyone together doing a pretty rigorous piece of scrutiny.”

She goes on to say that the GLA has succeeded in bringing people together to debate issues who otherwise may have never gone face-to-face. “It’s not high drama but having the different players together in the same room has often proved quite fruitful,” she observes. “I remember when we did something on doing filming in London and we had the producers and the local authorities together and you got a dialogue going.” Another good example is Stephen Nelson, the head of British Airports Authority, refusing to rule out a fourth runway at Heathrow, during a recent appearance before Assembly members.

While Nelson’s comments did indeed prompt many a headline, Hamwee says her views of the fourth estate have evolved over the past eight years. “I have chaired the budget committee for a lot of the last eight years and you can make the most perceptive and analytical comments about the way Transport for London spends its budget, for example, and not even the FT will take any notice. But if you accuse the mayor of ‘patronising sexist crap’ (in a TfL leaflet), even the FT publishes it! I think the media want us to achieve quick hits but it’s not always possible to achieve this. My views about the press have changed; for the better though, because I can see where the partnership is between the politicians and the media. With all that is going on at the moment, the hard facts are ones that the Assembly has brought out.”

Of course, the media, and Assembly members, have been very much on the front foot in recent weeks. The mayor has certainly been in their collective line of fire over controversies arising over the misuse of public funds. Hamwee, while not displaying any evident relish for the chase, clearly believes that the spotlight has succeeded in bringing relevant facts into the public domain.

“Yes, it has been a very busy time,” she says. “I’m certainly not going to suggest, as some might, that those who are in the same party as the mayor are incapable of scrutinising him, because that isn’t the case. I think some very good scrutiny has come from some members of the Labour group – they’re not all patsies.”

Hamwee has known the mayor, who is now seeking his third term in office, for a considerable period of time. A question about how the mayoralty has affected him prompts a pause, and then an interesting recollection. “In the Lords when we were scrutinising the legislation setting up the mayor’s office, I and a colleague pushed amendments that would limit the mayor’s term,” she says. “Now, with all this controversy, people are asking: ‘Why isn’t there a term limit?’ At some point, it is going to be remembered that an attempt was made to do this, but it was opposed by the government and by the Conservatives. It should also be remembered that Livingstone, as MP for Brent East, stood up in the Commons and argued in favour of a term limit.”

Hamwee, unsurprisingly, still maintains that a term limit for the mayor would be advantageous to all concerned – not least Livingstone himself. “There is a very respectable argument about democracy but I think that anyone who is in a position of such power and in such a prominent position for a long time, naturally – and I think it happened with Blair – begins to think that nobody else can do the job,” she says. “He has always, always surrounded himself with a small group of people. I don’t think the structure of the GLA is right and I think that the flaws in the structure have been magnified by the way this mayor chooses to operate.”

She instead favours much greater transparency. “If there is to be an executive mayor who is elected separately, which is a concept I’ve always struggled with – I do at local government level as well – then rather than having rather mysterious figures behind the scenes, I think they should be entirely open and be designated as deputy mayors and then it would be much clearer,” she observes. “After all, the current controversies are all about who is running the show and who are people taking orders from.”

Hamwee, who is not standing for re-election in May, will be passing on the baton but there remains a considerable amount of work to get through. “Although we are rather winding things up, we’ve done a lot of work about the London Development Agency,” she says. “We wrote to them asking for information about cultural grants in July 2006 and this is still rolling on. We have to try and prise the doors of certain organisations open to get at the relevant information. This work is now reaching its crescendo just as other controversies with the mayor are coming to the fore, but this coincidence is down to the fact that the organisations we scrutinise are not particularly speedy in coming forth with the evidence.”

The Assembly’s work stems from the fact that she and her colleagues ask a lot of questions, she adds. “We’ve got quite a lot of reports coming out. We’ve been looking at the changes in Lottery funding on cultural and grassroots sport organisations. We’ve been doing a lot of work on the Olympic budget. Whoever comprises the Assembly after May will, I’m sure, put a lot of effort into the Olympics. The Games are being scrutinised from every direction but there is nobody else who is looking at it from a London perspective. If you look at the membership of the Commons culture, media and sport committee there is only one London MP there, so we are asking important questions.

“Things are changing. The mayor now has power of direction over the Fire Authority, and the membership of it has changed somewhat. The composition of the Police Authority is changing too. One of my criticisms is that those authorities where the mayor is responsible for appointing the membership are the ones which are the most opaque, like the LDA and Transport for London.”

Hamwee may now be approaching the final lap of her time at the GLA but one memory in particular sticks out. “Our report into the July 7th bombings stands out because no-one else was doing that,” she points out. “‘Highlight’ is the wrong word to describe it, but it made a strong impact on me. I remember one particular episode when someone who had been involved in the bombings came down on to the floor of the chamber at the end of one of the evidence sessions, even now it makes me quite tearful to think of it, and said ‘thank you’, just for doing the work, because no-one else had done it.

“There was a strong feeling here that it was the right thing to do but we encountered quite a lot of resistance from some of the organisations who felt that we were out to get them, but this wasn’t the case as we were just out to get the facts. I thought it was very significant that someone who had been involved and was personally very affected thought that it was such an important thing to have done.”