Len Duvall OBE AM 

Chair of the London Assembly  

Len was elected as London Assembly Member for Greenwich and Lewisham in 2000, retaining his seat in every subsequent election.   

Len has been leader of the Labour Group at City Hall since 2004 and is the longest serving Assembly Member, having attended the inaugural meeting of the Assembly in 2000. 

With over twenty years at City Hall, his priorities have included better resourcing for the Metropolitan Police, better transport for south-east London and, most recently, efforts to address cost of living as chair of the Assembly’s Cost of Living Working Group. Len is a vocal champion for the armed forces and has been the Mayor’s Armed Forces Champion for the past five years. 

He has also campaigned on the Daniel Morgan case, ensuring the legacy of the Olympics serves all Londoners and exposing former Mayor Johnson’s improper relationship with Jennifer Arcuri. At the local level, Len has campaigned for regeneration and renewal projects at the Thames Gateway and Greenwich Waterfront. 

Len is involved in a number of local charities. He is chair of the Royal Greenwich Heritage Trust, chair of the South London Special League and a trustee of the Society of the Friends of the Royal Artillery Museum.  

 Prior to his time on the Assembly, he was a long-standing Greenwich councillor and served as leader of the council from 1992-2000. In 1998, he was awarded an OBE for his contribution to London Local Government. 

The Rt Hon Lord Michael Heseltine CH 

The Rt Hon the Lord Heseltine CH was a Member of Parliament from 1966 to 2001. He was a Cabinet Minister in various departments from 1979 to 1986 and 1990 to 1997 and Deputy Prime Minister from 1995 to 1997. Lord Heseltine later served as an advisor to the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Growth, and as a Commissioner on the National Infrastructure Commission (October 2015 to March 2017). He is the founder and Chairman of the Haymarket Group. 

Mary Harpley 
Chief Officer of the GLA 

Mary Harpley joined the GLA as Chief Officer in September 2018. Mary has previously held a number of roles in local and regional government as: Chief Executive, London Borough of Hounslow; Chief Executive, Cherwell District Council; and Corporate Director at Advantage West Midlands, the former Regional Development Agency for the West Midlands. 

Nik Johnson 

Former Mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough (2021–2025) 

Nik Johnson served as the mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough from 2021 to 2025. He was previously elected as a Huntingdonshire district councillor for St Neots East in 2018. He has alos worked as a paediatrician at Hinchingbrooke Hospital since 2007. 

This session will take stock of the latest developments in national government reforms of mayoral powers and its expectations of devolved scrutiny. It will reflect on conversations surrounding the devolution bill in the House of Commons, as well as Government statements and the Scrutiny Protocol, to discuss views on the direction of travel for mayoral scrutiny. 

SPEAKERS 
 

• Bassam Mahfouz AM joined the Assembly in 2024 as Assembly Member for Ealing and Hillingdon. He is Chair of the GLA Oversight Committee and the Devolution Working Group. He has also been an Ealing Councillor since 2005, representing his hometown of Northolt and a cabinet member since 2010.
• Simon Kaye became Director of Policy at Re:State in 2022, leading the Re:Imagining Whitehall programme. In 2024 he developed and led the new Re:Imagining the Local State programme.  

• Ed Hammond is Deputy Chief Executive at the Centre for Governance and Scrutiny. CfGS’s purpose is to support public (and other) bodies across the country to enhance their governance arrangements. The organisation has been particularly active in the English devolution space over the past decade, with much of that work having been led by Ed himself. Ed has conducted reviews for a number of combined authorities on governance and scrutiny matters, and has contributed to national research and publications on the subject of combined authority governance, including Government’s Scrutiny Protocol.  
  Ed has written extensively on the objectives and possible practical operations of local Public Accounts Committees.

The Government is seeking to reform local audit arrangements as part of its devolution plans, with further proposals also expected. The Local Audit Office is being established, while audit committees with independent members are to be mandatory for strategic authorities. This session will explore how elected Members can be supported to fulfil the key function of overseeing the financial governance of mayoral authorities and how their impact can be strengthened. 

SPEAKERS 

• Neil Garratt AM has served as London Assembly Member for Croydon and Sutton since 2021, and is the Chairman of the Budget & Performance Committee and Audit Panel. Neil has also been a councillor in the London Borough of Sutton since 2014. He has worked in IT with a career in global data works and project management.
   

• Honorary Professor Aileen Murphie MA(Hons), MA, FCPFA, FAcSS had a long career in the National Audit Office, reporting to Parliament on the effectiveness of government spending. From 2013-21, she was Director of MHCLG and local government value for money reporting to Parliament on financial sustainability, local economic growth, devolution and local public audit. Post retirement, Aileen was a Specialist Advisor to the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Select Committee of the House of Commons, 2021-24, advising on local government activity to MPs of all parties. She is an honorary professor at Durham University Business School and a co-author of a history of the National Audit Office: Holding Government to Account: Democracy and the National Audit Office 1984-2024 published in 2024. Aileen is a Fellow of CIPFA and chairs the Institute’s Practice Oversight Panel, overseeing current practice and trends in local public bodies’ finance and governance. 
   

• Gloria Dawson is part of Research for Action, a worker co-operative focusing on local democracy, accountability and information rights. Established in 2017, RfA's work has explored local government loan schemes, audit and accountability, and information rights, with an emphasis on citizen and grassroots action, including journalism and local media. RfA is currently working on a 3-year project ‘Councils in Crisis’, exploring the effects of government interventions in local authorities in financial distress. Gloria lives in Glasgow and is an experienced participatory and grassroots researcher in housing, regeneration and urban planning, as well as a trained community organiser.
   

• Diana Melville is the policy lead on internal audit, audit committees and local authority governance at CIPFA and the lead advisor for the BGF. She represents CIPFA on the Internal Audit Standards Advisory Board. She is the author of Audit Committees: Practical Guidance for Local Authorities and Police (2022), and co-author of Internal Audit: Untapped Potential (2022). She is a CIPFA Fellow and is also a member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. 
    

• Dame Meg Hillier MP is the Member of Parliament for Hackney South and Shoreditch and Chair of the Treasury Select Committee. The committee examines the expenditure, administration and policy of HM Treasury, HM Revenue & Customs, and associated public bodies, including the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority. Meg also chairs the Liaison Committee – a committee comprised of all select committee Chairs. It considers the overall work of select committees, promotes effective scrutiny of Government, and questions the Prime Minister. From 2015-2024, she was Chair of the Public Accounts Committee – the cross-party committee that scrutinises the value for money of public spending and holds the Government to account for the delivery of public services. First elected in 2005, Meg has been a Home Office Minister and Shadow Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change.

Demonstrating the impact of scrutiny work has always been challenging – at national, regional and local level. This session will explore, practically, how reasonable it is that scrutiny is expected to demonstrate direct practical impact from all of its work, and what evidence to support a demonstration of impact might look like. It will also look at how success can be communicated to the wider organisation (and the wider area). 

WORKSHOP LEAD 
 

• Camilla de Bernhardt Lane is Director of Practice at the Centre for Governance and Scrutiny (CfGS), where she leads governance, scrutiny, and improvement reviews for public bodies and charities across the UK. With over 20 years’ experience, she specialises in helping organisations understand, measure, and articulate their impact, ensuring governance is meaningfully connected to strategic outcomes. 
  Camilla's work supports organisations to build credible impact frameworks, strengthen evaluation practice, and tell clear, compelling stories about the difference they make — even without formal decision-making power. She is also the author of CfGS’s Demonstrating Impact practice guide, which sets out a practical, evidence-based approach for showing the value of scrutiny and good governance 

Effective Mayoral scrutiny is underpinned by the presence of support from professional officers. Officers themselves take direction from members – who provide vital political leadership. Both groups of individuals need the capacity, and capability, to be able to carry out their roles effectively.

Although new remuneration arrangements help to ensure members’ commitment of time is recognised, councillors have a tough job juggling their CA scrutiny duties with those back at their home authority. From the officer perspective, CAs are fairly lean organisations with limited resource available for scrutiny support.

This workshop session will explore:

• Baseline expectations around resourcing – arising from the Scrutiny Protocol but also resting on assumptions about the tasks that scrutiny should be carrying out, now and in the future
• The different approaches taken across the country to supporting and resourcing the scrutiny function
• Some of the constraints and pressures that people have experienced – and where and how resourcing issues have been resolved or overcome
• Potential future models for support as scrutiny continues to evolve

WORKSHOP LEAD 
 

• Ed Hammond is Deputy Chief Executive at the Centre for Governance and Scrutiny. CfGS’s purpose is to support public (and other) bodies across the country to enhance their governance arrangements. The organisation has been particularly active in the English devolution space over the past decade, with much of that work having been led by Ed himself. Ed has conducted reviews for a number of combined authorities on governance and scrutiny matters, and has contributed to national research and publications on the subject of combined authority governance, including Government’s Scrutiny Protocol. Ed has written extensively on the objectives and possible practical operations of local Public Accounts Committees.  

This session will consider what civil society monitoring mechanisms exist at devolved / mayoral levels, how officials draw upon these as external resources to enhance scrutiny work, and how the scrutiny environment can be further developed at mayoral levels. 

SPEAKERS 

• Julia Cushion is mySociety’s Policy and Advocacy Manager. mySociety is a democratic technology charity that empowers people to participate more fully in democracy through open data and open-source websites such as TheyWorkForYou, WriteToThem, WhatDoTheyKnow and FixMyStreet. Before mySociety, Julia worked in Westminster for the UK Parliament’s Outreach and Engagement team, and for Hope for the Future, a charity that specialises in facilitating climate conversations between citizens and politicians.
    

• Joe Mitchell co-founded and co-directed Democracy Club from 2016-2020. Previously, he gained experience in comms and advocacy with Purpose PBC, the UK Civil Service and Commonwealth Secretariat, and has experience with NGOs such as Transparency International and Global Witness.  
   

• Isaac Beevor has 7 years of experience working and campaigning on local climate action, in the UK and across Metro Vancouver. Isaac worked to support Vancouver's low-emission buildings policy and introduce an annual measuring and reporting system across the region. Having joined Climate Emergency UK, Isaac collated all UK council’s net zero targets, played a founding role in the Council Climate Scorecards and leads on the national climate duty campaign.  
   

• Caroline Russell AM joined the Assembly in 2016 as a walking and cycling campaigner focused on accessibility and road danger reduction. Caroline is now Leader of the City Hall Greens and serves on Transport, Oversight and Confirmation hearings Committees.

Government has said it wishes to “explore” the idea of establishing local Public Accounts Committees. These are committees designed to look at the value for money of public spend across a whole area – taking a cross-cutting approach to scrutiny of the outcomes and delivery of Mayoral priorities in a partnership context.

This connects closely to a model of Mayoral accountability that moves beyond the bounds of the CA as an institution – reflecting the broader powers given to Mayors in the Devolution Bill to convene partners locally, and to work cross-border with other Mayors.

We will aim to tackle, through discussion between the panel and amongst those in the room, three key questions:

• Do we agree that the “tasks” we’ve described – a model of place-based cross-partnership scrutiny following the public pound, investigating value for money of investment – are ones that are necessary in the context of the wider governance and accountability environment?
• What might be the best structural model to carry out this function? Is a standalone “PAC” or similar the best approach – or should we be exploring how we can evolve existing scrutiny arrangements to deliver these new tasks?
• How much of this work will be about scrutiny of the Mayor directly, and how much of other individuals and agencies beyond the SA? Should scrutiny, LPACs or another model have increased powers in relation to a wider range of partners – and what might the relationship be with local authority scrutiny in this context?
• Depending on how we answer these questions, what are the practical implications for designing and setting up new arrangements for this form of scrutiny – the role of elected politicians, for the public, others – and what are the implications for the resourcing of those arrangements?

SPEAKERS 
  

• Dr Mark Sandford has been a senior research analyst at the House of Commons Library since 2008.  
  Mark has written a wide range of material over some 25 years in the area of devolution of power in England, local government finance, and associated matters. He writes regular briefings on these matters for publication by the Library. He has also co-authored and advised on a number of academic research projects.  
  Mark is co-author, with Zoe Billingham, of a recent IPPR North paper exploring Mayoral scrutiny arrangements, recommending the establishment of “Mayoral Authority Accountability Committees” as an evolution both of the existing overview and scrutiny model and the possible adoption of local Public Accounts Committees.  
   

• Julia Cleary is Head of Corporate Support and Governance at West Midlands Combined Authority, and Deputy Monitoring Officer. She has a background in scrutiny and democratic services in local government, most recently having been Scrutiny Manager at Wolverhampton Council.  
   

• Ed Hammond - see above

Mayoral Development Corporations have been a major focus of plans for forging ahead with urban regeneration and housing, with several large scale MDC announcements in the last few months. This session will explore how MDCs in Greater London have been scrutinised, by elected Members, communities and in internal governance, consider emerging practice in Combined Authorities, and consider how to make scrutiny of MDCs impactful and effective. 

SPEAKERS 

• Andrew Boff AM has served as a London-wide Assembly Member since 2008 and is Deputy Chairman of the Assembly. Andrew has campaigned for housing policies to tackle overcrowding and build the homes London needs. Andrew previously ran his own IT company. He has served as a councillor in Hillingdon, where he led the council, and in Hackney. 
   

• Anne Ogundiya is an experienced urban planner and regeneration specialist with over 30 years' experience shaping places across London and the South-East. She has led major planning, infrastructure and legacy projects at the Olympic Delivery Authority and the London Legacy Development Corporation, where she served as Head of Planning and Transformation. Anne is co-founder of Beyond the Red Line, a consultancy focused on inclusive, people-centred masterplanning and regeneration. Her work champions design quality, planning reform, and social value through collaborative and community-rooted approaches. Anne is an Independent Member of the Old Oak and Park Royal Corporation Planning Committee. Anne is also a panel member for LB Barnet’s Quality Review Panel, as well as LB Newham and LB Merton's Design Review Panels.
   

• Sukhvinder Kaur-Stubbs is an experienced board director and civic leader whose career spans housing, infrastructure, and innovation. She serves on the Board of the Regulator of Social Housing and has held senior non-executive roles across the NHS, higher education, and utilities sectors. A former Board Member of the London Legacy Development Corporation, she brings first-hand insight into the complexities of urban regeneration, devolution, and public accountability. Her work focuses on building trust in public institutions and ensuring inclusive growth through effective governance and scrutiny.
   

• Connor Malone began his local government career in 2020 at City of York Council, joining the SMART Transport Team as an apprentice. Successfully completing PRINCE2 certification, he transitioned into a full-time role before moving to Tees Valley Combined Authority in 2024. He joined as Governance and Scrutiny Officer, a role encompassing the role of Statutory Scrutiny Officer and wider governance support. He has led on the implementation of the Scrutiny Protocol and contributed to its ongoing development, while also supporting the broader governance function during periods of high demand.
   

• Richard Berry is Interim Head of Financial Scrutiny in the London Assembly secretariat. He has also managed the Assembly's Research Unit, and been responsible for leading scrutiny projects focused on the proposed Oxford Street Development Corporation. Previous roles include Strategy & Performance Adviser to the Deputy Mayor for Fire and Managing Editor of Democratic Audit. 

This workshop will invite contributions from different mayoral areas on their approach to Mayoral questions, requiring mayoral time, and supporting members to perform their scrutiny work. 

WORKSHOP LEADS 
  

• Helen Ewen joined the GLA as Executive Director of the London Assembly Secretariat in November 2021. She was a Civil Servant for 20 years and held a number of policy and private office roles in both the Cabinet Office and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. 
    

• Rebecca Arnold is Assistant Director of Committee & Member Services at the London Assembly, responsible for leading the Committee Services Team, which provides meetings support to the London Assembly and a range of GLA Group bodies. She provides direct support to London Assembly for statutory  Mayor's Question Time meetings. 
    

• Nik Johnson served as the mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough from 2021 to 2025. He was previously elected as a Huntingdonshire district councillor for St Neots East in 2018. He has also worked as a paediatrician at Hinchingbrooke Hospital since 2007. 

Final addresses will reflect on the themes of the day. Greg Power will provide reflections on scrutiny in an international as well as UK context in Making scrutiny work: what the rules say and what they mean in practice. Len Duvall, Chair of the Assembly, will close the conference.  

SPEAKERS 
 

• Greg Power OBE has been involved in political and parliamentary reform since the mid-1990s.  He co-founded GPG in 2005 to deliver projects in these fields, and has since worked extensively in parliaments abroad. In that role, he provides direct support to politicians and ministers, developing strategies and helping to implement reform.  He is an expert in political economy analysis and writes widely on behavioural approaches to politics and managing the process of change. 
   

• Len Duvall OBE – see bio above