• Question by: Steve O'Connell
• Meeting date: 04 July 2012

On that latter point, the brief of MOPAC has indeed been widened and indeed your manifesto pledge about bringing in a new Sentencing Unit under the control of yourself is encouraging, because I think Londoners would have been heartened by the speed and the swift response of the justice system to the riots last year, the point you just made. Would you like to see perhaps that continue and the justice system to actually learn some lessons themselves from how they reacted last year to continue with that sort of improvement?

• Question by: Roger Evans
• Meeting date: 04 July 2012

As you know, Boris, I have praised before the Borough Commander at Havering, Chief Superintendent Mike Smith, who used his police on the night of the riots to attempt to pre empt incidents by stopping troublemakers at the railway station as they arrived in Romford and using Automatic Number Plate Recognition technology to stop suspect vehicles on the ring road before they got to town. Is this not a method we should use more throughout the Metropolitan Police Service, because it is better to actually prevent crimes taking place, it is cheaper to do that and better for potential victims...

• Question by: Steve O'Connell
• Meeting date: 04 July 2012

Thank you very much. That was the sort of list that we should be attending to, because they were the prime examples of where the police did not get it completely right last year. We are only a month away from the anniversary of the riots, and I am not speaking just for Croydon, these affected Tottenham and other parts of our great city, and other parts of the United Kingdom, and what is important to take away today is reassurance. What I am asking from you, Mr Mayor, and I know that you asked your previous Deputy Mayor, and...

• Question by: Steve O'Connell
• Meeting date: 04 July 2012

Also heartened very much that only a short while after last year's events there was potential of another bad event, again in South London, around Forest Hill, where lessons were indeed learned and there was a very quick deployment. Lastly, Mr Mayor, I think, and I am reassured, and I know Croydon residents particularly will be reassured that measures have been put into place that there will be no recurrence of last August. But I think the last point really is about reassurance and going forward, so residents out there will understand very much the challenges that the police find...

• Question by: Tony Arbour
• Meeting date: 04 July 2012

For crime to be prevented and for criminals not to want to commit crime, there needs to be two things. One is a certainty of being caught and secondly that they should be punished with a punishment that actually limits their freedom. When the curfews were established it was thought that was going to be a successful way of inhibiting criminals. Criminals have not been inhibited simply because the tagging system has not been successful. I wonder whether your Sentencing Unit might be looking at imaginative ways of sentencing, which will give criminals something to fear. Would it, for example...

• Question by: Tony Arbour
• Meeting date: 04 July 2012

We have MOPAC's principal new thing that it has promulgated, by Kit [Malthouse] firstly and then Stephen [Greenhalgh], was that victims of crime will all be contacted by police to ask if they want a visit. One way of ensuring that there is less pressure on police to visit victims of crime if there is less crime. Can I suggest to you that less crime will be created if there are imaginative sentences like this.

• Question by: Victoria Borwick
• Meeting date: 04 July 2012

Thank you very much, Mr Mayor. Certainly I think the real problem here is that we must help the police improve the confidence level in their policing in order that more of the public feel happy to assist the police in their investigations. We have discovered, as we have through the MPA and others, that many of the crimes that affect people, particularly like robbery and burglary and so forth, are screened out and, therefore, the public have less confidence in reporting crime. So I would urge you to consider and to continue to support the idea of not screening...

• Question by: Andrew Boff
• Meeting date: 04 July 2012

Thank you, Mr Mayor. In your own usual style, you described the relay as the democratisation of the fire of the Gods.

• Question by: Stephen Knight
• Meeting date: 04 July 2012

Mr Mayor, you announced in 2009 that there would be a cleaner taxi fund, almost three years later the fund has yet to appear. When is the cleaner taxi fund going to emerge and when are you going to start cleaning up London's taxis?

• Question by: Stephen Knight
• Meeting date: 04 July 2012

I am very pleased you are actively engaged. However, we know from a recent study that 25% of all particulate emissions in Central London are attributable taxis, so it is a really important issue. I do not think it is necessarily good enough to say that we do not ourselves drive the taxis to say we should not do something about it.