Guidance on giving evidence to London Assembly Committees
Information to help you give evidence to our Committees.
Giving spoken evidence at a London Assembly Committee meeting
Meetings usually take place in either the main Chamber or one of the Committee Rooms in City Hall. Please be aware, meetings are held in public and are webcast live.
Before the meeting
You can read background information on Committees and agenda papers. Formal agenda papers for the meeting will be published at least a week beforehand.
Committee staff will contact you to outline the topic of the meeting.
We will send you a formal invitation letter, which will include directions to City Hall and emergency contact details. Please alert Committee staff to any access requirements as early as possible.
We ask that all guests complete a short diversity monitoring survey, to help us to ensure the Assembly is receiving evidence from a wide range of people, reflecting the diversity of the city.
You may want to watch part of the webcast of a previous meeting to familiarise yourself with the format.
Presentations and/or handouts are not usually required, although your organisation may have also submitted written evidence to the Committee. We will discuss with you in advance if this is likely to be requested by the Committee.
We can reimburse reasonable public transport costs and other transport costs required for access or other exceptional circumstances. These costs should be agreed with Committee staff in advance of the meeting.
If you request it, our external relations team can send you a copy of the press release publicising the meeting.
Please contact Committee staff if you have any other queries in advance of the meeting.
On the day of the meeting
Please arrive 15 minutes before you are due to appear, as airport style security operates at City Hall.
The meeting will usually be in the form of a question and answer session. The Chair will ask each guest to introduce themselves before moving onto questions from Committee Members.
Meetings are held in public and are webcast live. Webcast recordings are available shortly after meetings.
The meeting will also be promoted to the media and may result in associated media and social media activity. If you would like to publicise your attendance, please feel free to use our Twitter handle @LondonAssembly or provide a link to our website www.london.gov.uk/assembly. If you provide us with your Twitter handle, we may include it if we send tweets during the meeting.
It would be helpful to tell our external relations team if you plan to publicise your attendance through the media or social media. You can contact the external relations team on [email protected].
If you are giving evidence for part of a meeting only, you are welcome to observe the rest of the meeting from the public gallery and other representatives from your organisation are welcome to observe the meeting in the public gallery.
Water is provided for guests at the meeting. Guests are welcome to bring in their own tea and coffee, which is available from the café on the Lower Ground Floor.
After the meeting
Guests are encouraged to provide feedback on the experience of participating in a meeting via Committee officers.
You will be invited to review a transcript of the meeting within a week of the meeting, prior to its publication on the Assembly website.
If at the meeting you have undertaken to provide further information, the Committee will write to you confirming this request.
The transcript of the meeting will be treated as formal evidence and may be cited in Assembly publications.
Making a written submission to a London Assembly investigation
Submissions should aim to concisely address the questions outlined by the Committee, as well as any other issues you consider it important for the investigation to cover.
Each submission should:
- Be in a self-contained Word document, where possible;
- State clearly who the submission is from, including whether the submission is from an individual in a personal capacity or sent on behalf of an organisation;
- For longer submissions, it would be helpful to include an executive summary of the main points made in the submission;
- Include a brief introduction about yourself or your organisation;
- Include any factual information of particular relevance to the investigation;
- Include any recommendations for action by the Mayor or others which you would like to be considered.
Please note that the Assembly will publish written submissions on our website unless they are marked as confidential, or there is a legal reason for non-publication. However, we may be required to release a copy of your submission if a member of the public, or the media, request it under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, even if it has been marked as confidential.
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