Holding Mayoral Advisors to account

Following several question-and-answer sessions with Mayoral appointments, the GLA Oversight Committee has written to the Mayor, with a number of recommendations regarding his advisors.

• The Chief of Staff and Deputy Chief of Staff should disclose their objectives for the Mayoral Term to the Committee.
• Mayoral Directors should be made aware of the budget implications for their respective teams, to ensure that the London Assembly can adequately scrutinise their work and ensure that they are delivering value for money for Londoners.
• Ensure quicker responses are received to Assembly and Assembly constituents’ correspondence

Chair of the GLA Oversight Committee, Caroline Pidgeon AM, said:

“The relationship between Mayoral Directors and the London Assembly has had a patchy past. As a Committee, we want to improve that and hope this letter to the Mayor will go some way towards that.

“We were disappointed that neither the Chief of Staff, or the Deputy Chief of Staff were able to tell the Committee their objectives for the Mayoral Term, rather stating that their objectives were to serve the Mayor and deliver his priorities. To ensure that Mayoral Advisors are delivering value for money, we need to be able to measure their success, and assessing the delivery of objectives would enable us to do this.

“We also discovered that not a single one of the three Mayoral Directors were able to disclose the budget for their respective teams, advising that the Chief of Staff was the budget holder. This is not an acceptable response. Given the level of responsibility that Mayoral Directors hold and their generous remuneration, we would expect, at the very least, that they could give us an approximate cost of the teams for which they are responsible.”