Ever since the first London mayor and Greater London Assembly were elected in 2000, the capital’s politics – in stark contrast to those at Westminster – have been interesting, quirky and unpredictable, usurping traditional party lines and suffering less from the malaise of popular cynicism than either local authorities or national politicians. Our two mayors have been idiosyncratic and wayward characters, held at arm’s length by party leaderships that seem at times to both fear and envy their success.

Meanwhile, Assembly elections, which use a system of proportional representation, have produced a rather continental political culture at City Hall. While the parties at Westminster steal each others’ ideas, here coalitions have emerged to blend political traditions. Hence the new chair of the Greater London Assembly: today Darren Johnson, one of the two Green Members, begins his year at the centre of the Labour-LibDem-Green alliance that dominates the Assembly.

Johnson owes his position to the interplay of electoral maths and London’s constitution. The powers of the mayor, Boris Johnson, are far-reaching: he only requires the backing of a third of the Assembly to pass his budget, and can set policies without a vote. However, the Assembly elects its own chair by a simple majority vote; this has stimulated the formation of a three-party alliance, enabling the opposition parties to share out the chairmanships of scrutiny panels and rotate the Assembly’s chair between them.

“No party has an absolute majority, so if you’re not prepared to talk to other parties, then you can achieve absolutely nothing,” explains Johnson. “Because of the very nature of the way this place is set up and the makeup of the Assembly, cross-party negotiations are its lifeblood.”

Checks and balances

So, what are Johnson’s ambitions for his time in the chair? “To hold the mayor to account robustly; to ask awkward questions and scrutinise his policies, and make sure that due process is followed – because sometimes he’s happy to announce that something is a done deal without all the checks and balances and due processes,” he replies wryly. In particular, he hopes to influence a set of mayoral policy documents as they come up for renewal this year – including Ken Livingstone’s economic development strategy, the London Plan.

That plan “saw the financial services sector as the absolute powerhouse, with a very centralised economy based on the City and Canary Wharf,” says Johnson, adding with a hint of smugness that “many of us argued for a more ‘polycentric’ approach, with a much wider range of jobs. I think if you look at the situation we’re in now, putting all our eggs in the financial business services basket was not sensible; we will need to diversify and embrace green industries, and hopefully we’ll see some new thinking there.” But as he suggests, Johnson can only hope for “new thinking” from the mayor; gone are the glory days of 2004-8, when Livingstone needed the Greens’ votes to pass his budget. That term saw the London Development Agency’s climate-change budget rise from £300,000 to £13m, while the cycling and walking budgets tripled.

“We had an amazing series of initiatives, and London led the way in a number of areas,” says Johnson; “We had decisive influence over the budget.” He does concede that the Greens don’t deserve all the credit, though: “Ken did genuinely become convinced that climate change needed a much higher profile.”

This mayor, the chair believes, will play a very different game. “Boris didn’t come knocking at my door to ask what I wanted in the budget this time round,” he laughs. “He’s got enough Conservative members to get his budget through safely.” And he is clearly worried about the new mayor’s commitment to sustainability: “We’re seeing some very mixed messages and confusing signals from Boris Johnson; he says he’s committed to a 60 per cent CO2 reduction by 2025, but so many of the initiatives designed to achieve that – the £25 congestion charge for gas-guzzlers, the hydrogen vehicles programme, the London Cycle Network – have been scrapped or cut back. We’re hearing the talk, but seeing nothing like a coherent programme.”

For Darren Johnson, it’s clearly frustrating to have a majority in the Assembly – yet no power to stop the new mayor from turning policies 180 degrees. “It was decided that we’d be given the power of persuasion, and that’s what we’ve got to work with. The mayor-Assembly model is a done deal for London; nobody is seriously proposing unravelling it,” he says. “But I’d be concerned about advocating it as a model for use across the country: there’s a problem with putting too much power in the hands of one individual, without having greater powers for the Assembly.”

In fact, Johnson does argue for some “sensible small changes” to London governance. “Just as the Assembly requires a two-thirds majority to amend the mayor’s budget, you could introduce a similar mechanism for mayoral strategies,” he says. When similar changes were considered under the last mayor, he adds, “a lot of the Labour members were under the impression that Ken Livingstone was going to be in power forever, and were unwilling to concede that the Assembly required more powers. I think if we were to revisit it now, we’d have far more of a consensus; now we’ve had the first change of mayor, people are starting to see it as an institution and not as a person.”

Rethinking the region

Johnson also argues for a reduced role for the Government Office for London – “It would be sensible to have a small liaison unit, but its huge remit seems ridiculous when we have devolved government” – and for the GLA to play a part in managing London’s NHS. “If the Assembly was to take on more powers, we’d have to revisit its size,” he adds, suggesting that the mayor’s paid advisers could then be replaced by a cabinet formed of elected members.

Despite his complaints, the Assembly’s chair seems resigned to operating within the current system for the foreseeable future. For other UK cities considering introducing mayors, though, he has a warning.

“There’s a danger of concentrating too much power in the hands of one person, who either delegates much of that power to advisers – bringing issues around a lack of democratic accountability – or takes every decision, but without their eye completely on every ball,” he says. “So you either sign stuff off yourself and allow all sorts of cock-ups, which you occasionally saw with the Livingstone model, or you delegate huge swathes of power to unelected advisers, which is the Boris Johnson model – and there’s flaws in each.”

What has made London’s system effective, he continues, is not the mayor’s role, but his conurbation-wide remit: “It’s a democratic government for the whole city-region, with strategic powers.”

So while David Cameron has sounded enthusiastic about city mayors, Johnson implies, the Conservatives’ plans are handicapped by their focus on electing mayors for individual boroughs rather than across conurbations. Even given a city-regional scale, Johnson concludes, he would recommend that Britain’s major cities plump for the “assembly and leader model”, in which the assembly itself chooses a leader:

“I would go for something that looks more like the Welsh Assembly Government than the Greater London Assembly,” he says. “And if cities were thinking of going down the mayoral route, I would certainly urge caution and say that the scrutiny body that holds the mayor to account needs to be given the powers to do that job properly.”


CV highlights
1966     Born in Southport, Lancashire
1987     Joins Green Party after Chernobyl disaster
1990     Moves to London and takes a job in accounts
1994     Begins a politics/economics degree at Goldsmiths
2000     Elected to the London Assembly
2002     Elected a Green councillor in Lewisham
2004     Stands as the Greens’ candidate for London mayor
2009     Begins his year as chair of the London Assembly