• Question by: Jennette Arnold OBE
• Meeting date: 12 March 2008

Lastly, and I do not know if we can put it in the system, colleges have reported back to me how useful this has been as a measure. I was recently at Hackney College and they were saying there that they feel that the young people have stayed in higher education because that has helped them because it is one less thing that has worked as a deterrent against them maintaining their education. I would like some feedback by colleges because I think you will find that that has had a great deal of success in that area.

• Question by: Peter Hulme Cross
• Meeting date: 12 March 2008

You mentioned that a lot of children are living below the poverty line. Undoubtedly this is useful [information] in that context but here you are dabbling in social engineering are you not?

• Question by: Jennette Arnold OBE
• Meeting date: 12 March 2008

Peter raises an important question but I think in his questioning he is demonstrating just how little knowledge is held by people about the dire circumstances of many of the young people in London. Would you agree with me that the work that is coming out of the Child Poverty Strategy, the work coming out of the Health Inequalities Framework and certainly the work that I have been part of, the work of the London Health Commission working with Government Office for London and the local authorities, is essential work and is the sort of work that we are intending...

• Question by: Peter Hulme Cross
• Meeting date: 12 March 2008

lot of children like to be independent; a lot of them will get on a bicycle and some of them will walk, but where travel is free on a bus they will just jump on a bus.

• Question by: Peter Hulme Cross
• Meeting date: 12 March 2008

It is not the right message to give to children that something is free. You do not go into a sweet shop and help yourself to a handful of sweets; you pay for them. Likewise, if you are going to get on a bus and travel from A to B there should be a charge for it, otherwise children get the wrong idea that something is provided free and they can just make hay with it, as many of them appear to do.

• Question by: Angie Bray
• Meeting date: 12 March 2008

I think the problem is that what you are doing is you are switching an awful lot of other people who do not get their free travel off the buses altogether and the problem for you is that they are going to go back to using their cars again which is precisely the opposite of the effect that you want to create in London.

• Question by: Richard Barnes
• Meeting date: 12 March 2008

If one listened and believed you, Mr Mayor, you would think you were a one man drive to reduce unemployment in London by putting people in uniform and that we would be tripping over them. But why is it people in my constituency tell me, 'The Mayor tells me we are getting all these things' - and I recognise a question further on from Graham Tope which we will no doubt come in on - but they do not see them. There are 18 dedicated police officers in the London Borough of Hillingdon, the second largest geographical area in London...

• Question by: Peter Hulme Cross
• Meeting date: 12 March 2008

Yes, but children do not think about what contribution they are going to give in future years. They are focused on the present, quite rightly. Getting on to a bus does not cost anything, it is free. They get the idea that that is a right, that that is free. It is a very difficult thing to shift later on. It gives them quite the wrong idea. We have seen, where children get on to buses, they behave like children very often and it has an effect on all the other passengers on the bus. There are old people who...

• Question by: Peter Hulme Cross
• Meeting date: 12 March 2008

I think you are diverting the question here. That is what you are very good at, I have to say. Every time we ask for information we are told we cannot have it. We then have to make a Freedom of Information request which takes endless time to do. The supply of information is like getting blood out of a stone, particularly from your office.

• Question by: Peter Hulme Cross
• Meeting date: 12 March 2008

Mr Mayor, the Assembly has no power anyway. You know that better than anybody else. The only power that the Assembly has is to amend your Budget if we have a two-thirds majority and that is hard to achieve. If we were here 24 hours a day we still could not hold you to account, we still could not scrutinise what goes on effectively so that is not the issue. It is not the issue that Assembly Members have other jobs elsewhere. The issue is that when we want to scrutinise something we get the information at the last minute...