PUBLICITY AND AVAILABILITY OF STRATEGIES (Hansard, 4 November 1999)

§ Mr. Hill
I beg to move, That this House agrees with the Lords in the said amendment.

Mr. Deputy Speaker
With this it will be convenient to discuss Lords amendments Nos. 33 to 40, 48, 153, 213, 268 to 272, 424, 445, 446, 455, 483, 641 and 646.

§ Mr. Hill
Dealing with those amendments in the time available is an awesome challenge, Mr. Deputy Speaker. They tidy up and extend the arrangements for publicity and for the availability of strategies and other documents. The mayor will be required to keep a copy of the current version of each strategy, and the mayor's guidance document on application for bus service appointments, available for public inspection while they are in force.
The amendments specifying that it is the current version of those documents that should be kept available for inspection respond to concerns raised in Committee in the other place about requiring those documents to be available for a fixed period, which may have been shorter than the time for which they were in force. Following points raised in Committee in the other place, the mayor will have a duty to send each strategy to each London borough and the common council.
579 The amendments also require the strategies and the bus guidance document to be available for inspection at the GLA's principal offices and at such other places as the mayor considers appropriate, at reasonable hours and free of charge. Again, making the documents available at places other than the GLA's offices is a direct response to Opposition arguments in Committee in the other place.
The mayor will be required to keep copies of his or her annual report, the GLA's budget, substitute calculations—for example, a revised budget—the capital spending plan, Transport for London's annual report and the state of the environment report available for inspection for a period of six years from the date when each was first made available, at reasonable hours and free of charge at the GLA's principal offices.
Any person—that means organisations as well as individual members of the public—will have the right, on request, to be supplied with a copy of any of the documents, such as the strategies and all the other types of document, or any part of any of the documents, for such reasonable fee as the mayor may determine.
The amendments thus improve and extend the arrangements for the availability of published GLA documents, and respond to concerns raised in the other place.