• Question by: Jennette Arnold OBE
• Meeting date: 23 October 2013

Would that mean that you would then be in support of a good school with satisfactory features being bulldozed to create a free school?

• Question by: Onkar Sahota
• Meeting date: 23 October 2013

Thank you, Mr Mayor, for recognising that there is a crisis which we are getting now an every season crisis in the A&E department. Have you been given any reassurances through the Health Board that there are plans in place to deal with the situation for these winter months?

• Question by: Joanne McCartney
• Meeting date: 23 October 2013

Have you let the Government know that their proposals are ludicrous though? Currently, London accounts for 24% of national funding for victims.

• Question by: Joanne McCartney
• Meeting date: 23 October 2013

We all want to reduce reoffending, but if they do not have to have a seat at the table in our local Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership and there is no obligation to force them to do so, is that concern that you have as well?

• Question by: Tom Copley
• Meeting date: 23 October 2013

I was pleased to hear that you are aware of the issue around rent levels in the private rented sector. It is clearly a very big issue. I just wanted to raise a point that during the first quarter of 2013 monthly rents in London were almost 12% higher than they were the year before in the private rented sector. In Wandsworth they went up by over 15%, in Southwark they went up over 12.5% and in Tower Hamlets they went up over 16.5% and these rises do not show any sign of slowing down and they are contributing to...

• Question by: Tom Copley
• Meeting date: 23 October 2013

You have increased the number of landlords signed up to this by 2,400 in the 17 months since the election. You said by 2016 you want 100,000 landlords signed up. At the current rate it would take over 51 years to sign up 100,000 landlords. Even then that would only represent one-third of the landlords operating in London.

• Question by: Nicky Gavron
• Meeting date: 23 October 2013

We know - and you and I have discussed this - that we have 210,000 homes with planning permission which are not being built. We know that. In May, you told me that you thought land banking - and many of them are being banked to drive up value - is pernicious. Your word was ‘pernicious’. You have just talked about something that you talked about in your Vision, which is introducing a ‘use-it-or-lose-it’ planning permission. You have also talked at Mayor’s Question Time (MQT) with me about compulsory purchase order (CPO) powers and that they could be introduced, you...

• Question by: Stephen Knight
• Meeting date: 23 October 2013

Mr Mayor, on Friday I launched with Vince Cable [Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills] the Liberal Democrat Group’s contribution to the debate on London’s housing crisis. I sent you a copy of it. We are proposing essentially that the number of affordable houses in London should be upped from the current programme you referred to earlier, about 100,000 over your term, to nearer 400,000 through a big increase in public investment and a big use of public sector land for affordable housing. Mr Mayor, will you commit to reading and considering our proposals as part of your...

• Question by: Tom Copley
• Meeting date: 23 October 2013

Yes, but why have we had to wait this long when you were already consulting on a new draft Strategy in 2011? I have the timescale here. In 2010 you published your first Housing Strategy. In December 2011 you published a draft revised Housing Strategy for consultation. That consultation ended in March last year. Now, nearly two years after the launch of this consultation, you have still not published the final Strategy. Why now are you consulting on a new one?

• Question by: Tom Copley
• Meeting date: 23 October 2013

Mr Mayor, but the point of the question was that you were consulting on a new draft Strategy. You launched a consultation, I believe, in 2011. We have then been waiting and we have been getting delay after delay from your office. Whenever we have asked when that final Strategy is going to be published, you have always pushed the time back. Why now, having had that previous consultation on a draft Strategy, have you seemed to have ditched that in favour of consulting on a new one?