• Question by: Steve O'Connell
• Meeting date: 17 September 2014

Mr Mayor, I heard your earlier comments. You and TfL did ask for evidence of Sutton’s appetite for the tram. You now have it with 85% of the response being very positive across both boroughs [the London boroughs of Sutton and Merton]. You did ask - and TfL did ask - for a business plan with details of significant development in the town centre, significant regeneration and income uplift, and I suggest you and TfL now have that also. Would you therefore not agree that the case for the Sutton tram extension is in fact now irresistible?

• Question by: Tom Copley
• Meeting date: 17 September 2014

First of all, congratulations to you and commiserations to the people of Uxbridge and South Ruislip. Being a Member of Parliament (MP) is one thing, but taking up a Cabinet post or running for the leadership of the Conservative Party would be quite different, and both would require an immense amount of time and energy and would be entirely incompatible with remaining Mayor of London. Will you today make a firm commitment that you will not take up a Government post or run for the leadership of the Conservative Party whilst you are Mayor of London?

• Question by: Len Duvall OBE
• Meeting date: 17 September 2014

Mayor, I recognise why you are taking the steps for this but, look, half a million people attended last year and we are offering 100,000 this year. The price of a £10 ticket will quickly escalate. I presume we will have a strategy of stopping ticket-touts or having non-transferrable tickets. It will be difficult to do. Is that the reason why the £1 million that we might raise when we sell all these tickets is going towards the ticketing process, not towards the cost of policing and other ancillary issues to do with the fireworks?

• Question by: Darren Johnson
• Meeting date: 17 September 2014

If the objective of charging for tickets for New Year’s Eve is to tackle overcrowding rather than to make money, would an alternative solution not be better, if you were to sponsor a series of local events with the boroughs throughout London, so that there are alternatives that Londoners could go to, rather than simply cramming more and more people into central London?

• Question by: Steve O'Connell
• Meeting date: 17 September 2014

Just briefly picking up on the point on Gatwick, your observation around the Estuary is that it is still something that you see as medium to long-term and there will be an inevitability about it that it will come back on the table. Surely, Mr Mayor, by turning your face away from a Gatwick extension, the danger here is indeed a Gatwick extension does not happen, the Estuary does not happen and Heathrow stands there lurking over us as something we all do not want. Surely, Mr Mayor, Gatwick is deliverable and we should be supporting that as, in essence...

• Question by: Kit Malthouse
• Meeting date: 17 September 2014

On the Living Wage, this is obviously a cross-party campaign. While you very wisely adopted it and we have now hit and exceeded our target, are you aware of any Labour Members of the Assembly having written to a single employer in their constituencies or elsewhere urging them to participate in the scheme? Are you aware of any of them attending any of the launches, or congratulating any of the businesses, or attending any of the accreditation schemes for the Living Wage? Are you aware even of any of the London Labour MPs writing on the campaign, which incidentally the...

• Question by: Murad Qureshi
• Meeting date: 17 September 2014

We are still awaiting a response to our motion of 24 July about Vince Cable’s [Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills] botched privatisation of the Royal Mail. We ask there whether you are prepared to lobby Ofcom, the regulator, which has a statutory duty to protect the universal postal service over and above any competition considerations. So far they have not been willing to step in because of the more expensive service and the poor delivery - I hasten to add not because of the postal workers. Are you, as Mayor, prepared to make representations to Ofcom on...

• Question by: Jennette Arnold OBE
• Meeting date: 17 September 2014

It is a quick one. Mr Mayor, if you cannot make it to Tower Hamlets, would you ride the ten minutes down the road in the borough that you live, one of the richest boroughs in this city, and visit the food bank there, which is one of the busiest in London? It is the scale of the problem that my colleague, Fiona Twycross, has been speaking to you about now for months and months. Why do you refuse to even visit a food bank down the road from your house?

• Question by: Andrew Dismore
• Meeting date: 17 September 2014

I assume from your reply, such as it was, that you have not yet put your submission to the Government about this. There are only ten days or so to go and it will be interesting to see what you say. Thank you for your letter, by the way, about Premier House in my constituency, which was helpful but a little vague. Are you aware of the existing permitted development rights that if an office block like ‑‑ Boris Johnson (Mayor of London): The existing permitted development rights? Andrew Dismore AM: Yes, which the Government want to extend. If an...

• Question by: Andrew Boff
• Meeting date: 17 September 2014

Mr Mayor, I would appeal to you to get your officers to look at the London Plan and how you can actually rescue business because, despite what the Government has done - and I think the Assembly is fairly united in opposing this relaxation of planning rules with regard to commercial areas - councils themselves are getting rid of their employment space voluntarily. What they are doing is they are taking the provision in many plans that says you can have housing that is ancillary to a commercial development and they are using the interpretation of ‘ancillary’ as meaning ‘additional...