• Question by: Valerie Shawcross
• Meeting date: 05 November 2014

Valerie Shawcross CBE AM: Good morning. Just on a very specific issue, I was quite alarmed to see that the LFB may well have to pick up some of the bill for the additional pension costs for retained firefighters. I know this is a complex issue and it relates to an employment tribunal and I think we all agree that retained firefighters deserve a fair deal. However, it seems to me that the idea that the LFB ought to be paying the back pensions of retained firefighters when the London Fire Authority has never employed any retained firefighters, ever, does...

• Question by: Fiona Twycross
• Meeting date: 05 November 2014

Fiona Twycross AM: I just wanted to go back to a point raised by Assembly Member Boff - even though he is obviously no longer in the room - just to say that the data we have looked at, as I said earlier, shows that over half of the wards in London have seen an increase in the time it has taken the first fire engine to reach an incident and this does appear to be in part due to the additional appliances being out of operation between the strike periods. Commissioner, I know that you have been in discussions...

• Question by: Len Duvall OBE
• Meeting date: 05 November 2014

Len Duvall AM: In terms of LSP5, you said we would do some ongoing monitoring post those decisions. You will recall on 23 February 2014 there was a fatality on what can only be described as the Woolwich Ground - that might not be right - when we removed an appliance from the area. In the subsequent fatal fire review, there were a number of issues in terms of the cause of the fire. At the time, there was a technical failure that contributed to that. In light of the recent information that we have now supplied around the implications...

• Question by: Kit Malthouse
• Meeting date: 22 October 2014

I was going to ask you, Mr Mayor, how you define a journalist, but we are short of time and I will leave it there.

• Question by: Joanne McCartney
• Meeting date: 22 October 2014

Joanne McCartney AM: Mr Mayor, in an interview with LBC radio, you said that you had concerns about this and wanted to look into it - which I welcomed - and said that you thought it was wrong for the police just to go on a fishing expedition. The public concern about this is as to whether there are sufficient safeguards to stop the police from overreaching.

• Question by: Richard Tracey
• Meeting date: 22 October 2014

Mr Mayor, do you ever feel the same suspicions that I have that if you were a member of the Green Party, the Labour Party or the Liberal Democrat Party, there would be much more praise coming from them of your cycling plans and of what you have achieved since 2008?

• Question by: Valerie Shawcross
• Meeting date: 22 October 2014

Just continuing this theme of promoting cycling safety in London, I asked a written question at the last Mayor’s Question Time about how things were going with the 33 dangerous junctions that were being worked on under the Better Junctions programme. I was given no answer and was told this information would be released in coming months, despite the fact that the Assembly had had no detailed information on this for an entire year and it is an important issue. I spoke to the ‘cycling czar’ [Andrew Gilligan, Cycling Commissioner] only yesterday and he told me that only 11 junctions...

• Question by: Nicky Gavron
• Meeting date: 22 October 2014

Mayor, could we go back now to Earls Court? I was talking about the viability assessment and how you have looked at it very carefully because you even commissioned the District Valuer Services (DVS) to investigate Capco’s viability assessment. Presumably you agree with their findings, do you?

• Question by: Andrew Dismore
• Meeting date: 22 October 2014

What was the point of you giving £150,000 of taxpayers’ money to the Mount Pleasant Association to work up an alternative plan when you were always going to approve the Royal Mail Group scheme all along? It was sheer cynicism on your part, was it not?

• Question by: Andrew Boff
• Meeting date: 22 October 2014

Following on from that, Mr Mayor, can I recommend most strongly that you do look at the initiative being taken by three London boroughs - Croydon, Southwark and Lambeth - with regard to the information-sharing over existing Social Services casework that they have with a view to identifying those victims of trafficking? Often those victims of trafficking cannot really be seen unless you have been trained to see that. Croydon, particularly, has developed some ground-breaking training programmes which need to be distributed to the rest of London, quite frankly, in order to inform professionals - and indeed hotels may come...