http://newlondonarchitecture.org/WRL.pdf

Please see:
http://www.election.demon.co.uk/glc/glccomment.html

“Mr. Livingstone is a man of precious few powers. His direct control will extend only over a pounds 35 million (dollars 53.4 million) operating budget of the mayor’s office, a new 25-member Greater London Assembly and a staff of around 400.
The mayor will take over responsibility for London’s public transport system, the Metropolitan Police and London Fire Brigade, a new development agency and citywide planning, but he will have relatively little say over the pounds 3.6 billion budget for those services, most of which comes directly from the national Treasury. Mr. Blair’s home secretary, Jack Straw, will continue to appoint the London police commissioner.

The mayor will have even fewer powers over the 33 boroughs councils, which spend pounds 7.6 billion a year to deliver most of the services — from education and public housing to garbage collection — that most residents associate with local government. “This is to be the only mayor of any world class city with not a single tax at his disposal,” the columnist Simon Jenkins wrote in The Times newspaper. “Elected free, he will be everywhere in chains.”

Those constraints are no accident. For Mr. Blair’s Labour government, creating the mayoralty was as much about settling scores with Margaret Thatcher, who abolished the Greater London Council in 1986 to silence its radical leader, none other than Mr. Livingstone, as it was about creating effective local government. The government limited the mayor’s powers precisely to prevent any revival of Greater London Council-style extremism.”
Please see:
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/05/09/news/09iht-london.2.t_2.html?pagewanted=1
May 9, 2000
For Livingstone, Power Is Limited : Improving Life in London:Can Its New Mayor Deliver?

Please note: Birmingham, UK is trying to evolve a 3-tier system. It has a different model. Its leaders made public they had sought guidance from French sister city Lyon (which with pop of over 400,000 has a 9 borough system).

Ken Livingstone was the catalyst for the dissolution of the GLC and the first mayor elected when the GLA was established.

He doesn’t seem to realize what it means to have a RCM model for a city system. Perhaps it is because that is all his experience was with. The GLC was the first change of the London system into an RCM model type.

http://www.prospectmagazine. co.uk/2007/04/ interviewkenlivingstone/
Interview: Ken Livingstone

“T While we’re on politics, what about the London boroughs [London is organised into 32 separate boroughs, plus the City of London]? You’ve just reorganised the sub-regional partnerships into five slabs of cake, as opposed to the previous ones.

KL I think those should be the five London boroughs. No government will have the nerve to reorganise London government. It just makes sense to me in my internal planning. If a government gave me the power to reorganise boroughs, I’d amalgamate them into those five overnight. The five wedges have coherent transport links, and they all have wealth and poverty and a suburb. And also by creating these larger units in local government, they would attract the best officers, you could have perhaps 60 members in each, you might get some real talent.

TT So there’s not much talent in the existing boroughs?

KL At the moment, most London boroughs are lucky if they’ve got one good, effective political operator. I’ve had borough council leaders come in here and say thank you for meeting me, I’m going to ask our chief inspector to explain our position.

SP They’re not very natural democratic units, though.

KL Neither are the boroughs. What people would like is a neighbourhood council. If you take the 625 London wards, and you said each of these is a neighbourhood council, and local people could turn up once a month, and meet the local police team, discuss what’s happening in the local schools, discuss local planning applications, this would really empower people, people would have a real influence over their neighbourhood without being full-time politicians.

TT Are you encouraging the government’s urban parishes?

KL Absolutely. I’d like 625 of them in London, and you’d give them all a little budget of about £100,000 a year to spend on whatever they wanted.

TT And would a combination of little parishes and a strong City Hall be your desired long-term model?

KL Well, the parishes and City Hall plus but five strong boroughs that have sufficient wealth to tackle some of their own problems. Poor old Kensington & Chelsea can’t redevelop Sloane Square without my being involved—even the quite wealthy boroughs require me to lever support and planning. Five big wedge boroughs would have the power to do an awful lot without coming to City Hall. And they reflect travel to work patterns. When I grew up in Lambeth I had no friends over in Southwark because the boundary was like the Berlin wall—we all went west and did our vandalism in Battersea and Clapham. You would create a London wedge of Essex; west London is very coherent, almost the old Middlesex. The boroughs are too small to manage policing or health or really any economic regeneration, and they’re far too big to manage any personal services. But the change is not going to happen.

TT How far does the New York model appeal to you?

KL I think the mayor’s too strong and the boroughs are too weak.”

I should mention the special districts/authorities/quangos get in the way in any setting;and not just in NYC or UK. I have done an article for citymayors which discusses how it has affected the US system outside the cities. And as far away as India, the problem can be seen. Please read: http://www.financialexpress.com/news/too-many-cooks-in-each-others-way-for-the-urban-services-kitchen/121673/4

Furthermore, aside from what is mentioned in the article, both the NYC and London systems are flawed systems. More than the control fixation of the UK Government and NY state has produced this result. Although certainly it is an important factor, especially since control fixation has damaged London to such an extend that it performed poorly in a comparative study published in 2004 and financed by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. Please see:http://www.citymayors.com/ business/eurocities_gdp.html

In the 1960s, the Govt then led by the Conservatives changed the LCC formula into the GLC formula where the systemic balance seems to be inspired by the RCM formula of Canada (also seen in Urban Community formula of France). This formula is meant for cities and their suburbs, not for a citywide system. In effect for London it lowered the integration level of the system. The GLC was dissolved during the 1980s by the Thatcher Govt. In the restored area wide body of the GLA established during the late 1990s, The Govt led by the Labour party further restricted the GLC formula base. In fact, a New York Times article of the period the discussed London’s plight. I think neither party did enough research to realize how they were harming London-and in the final result UK, as London is the main economic engine. Hence, there should be no surprise why London performed so abnormally low in that 2004 study when compared to European cities.

Miami-Dade county has an RCM like formula implemented prior to London’s change; and has not suffered London’s problems. How could that be? It gained in integration level, while London lost it. With London there was no compensation for loss of integration.

A question to ask is why London was given a system meant for the city and its suburbs. It seems both the Canadians and the French know that this formula is not meant for a citywide system. Compare Paris with London;or for that matter the new systems of Quebec’s largest cities. Quebec cities went from an RCM like formula to a decentralized system upon consolidation. I doubt in UK they have the political will to do that in London, so I would suggested a more painless approach, which would be what is the Norm in RCMs and Urban Communites. This is the sitting of lower level leaders on the areawide body. It won’t guarantee a great improvement as the formula is inadequate to begin with; but, it should improve it especially if the leaders are given some lessons in learning how to think horizontally.

New Yorkers should keep in mind that funding is a big issue in London and that London doesn’t have the Wall Street region and a big revenue source for NYC. That is the City of London, a separate system of government. In sum London is a crippled system. But, then how is it that with more than two times the area of New York, it still has more better parts in the city than New York? This is visible to any tourist.

Perhaps it is because London has decentralized government? In fact, this has been a major trend in Europe since the 1980s;and also in South East Asia.

Both NYC and London are also hamstrung by the fact that interlocal cooperation with neighboring units is a missing factor. This, on the other hand, is a rising factor in Europe. Governing magazine published an article on one example:the Stuttgart Region which has been in place since the 1990s;and is a robust system unlike the various toothless regional bodies in US. Governing also did an article on the Niagara region and highlighted the prosperity produced by the RCM on the Canadian side with the depresssed US NY side, which despite the incentive from across the border has failed to rouse itself to cooperate more robustly.

So much has been accomplished by the GLA, as per Mr. Frug’s article, in a mere ten years.

My fascination with this history and wonderment at the NYC/GLA comparison was my experience as a squatter in London’s East End during the the halcyon days of GLC London in the 1970s.