• Question by: Caroline Pidgeon
• Meeting date: 18 June 2008

I wanted to focus on the important service issue with the boroughs. Do you support the Bromley Conservatives on London Council's Transport Committee who last week blocked the all party agreement on Freedom Pass costs, thus delaying this by several months and at high cost to the Council Tax payer? Are your colleagues once again threatening the Freedom Pass in London?

• Question by: Andrew Boff
• Meeting date: 18 June 2008

Mr Mayor, would you therefore support the main thrust of the arguments within the Trusting Devolution document forwarded by London Councils which spends some time talking about the best way to deliver services is at the most a local level and that really the only time that the Mayor for London or the GLA should be involved is where there are those London-wide issues? Also, do you think that this new approach would be able to heal the divide that has developed over the past eight years between inner and outer London boroughs and that outer London boroughs can expect...

• Question by: Len Duvall OBE
• Meeting date: 18 June 2008

So increasing police officer numbers is not something that equates with a better service for London then. Is that the proposition that you support, Mr Mayor, because that is what your colleague is saying?

• Question by: Andrew Boff
• Meeting date: 18 June 2008

What would you say to some Members opposite who have questions down on this agenda who complain that certain services in some boroughs are different from other services in other boroughs? Do you think that is a terrible thing and we should have consistency through London for all services to be exactly the same or do you, in fact, value the diversity that comes from borough government?

• Question by: Len Duvall OBE
• Meeting date: 18 June 2008

Let us go back then to the precept issues that you are planning. You will be supportive of precepts which would go broadly in line with your manifesto commitments of which policing is a major plank, I presume?

• Question by: Len Duvall OBE
• Meeting date: 18 June 2008

Do you support then using the precept to increase police officer numbers?

• Question by: James Cleverly
• Meeting date: 18 June 2008

Thank you, Mr Mayor. You have already gone some way to answering the point I was hoping to raise in my supplementary but I will raise it nonetheless. Obviously as a party and you throughout your campaign have championed localism and local autonomy and have opposed the one size fits all edict from above. I think the changes put forward by Darzi are another classic example of a single solution trying to be shoehorned into a range of circumstances and, as you say, there may well be examples where polyclinics and the coming together of GPs is entirely appropriate. However...

• Question by: James Cleverly
• Meeting date: 18 June 2008

Thank you. You mentioned the situation at Queen Mary's Hospital which is a high profile local example but obviously the impact of service closures in places like Queen Mary's also have a knock on effect to hospitals in the nearby areas that may themselves not be under the threat of service reductions. I think particularly of the situation between Queen Mary's Hospital and the Pru in Farnborough where the services being displaced from Queen Mary's are almost certainly going to cause an increase in demand on the services in a neighbouring borough and an increase in demand in comparison to...

• Question by: Kit Malthouse
• Meeting date: 18 June 2008

I wanted to reinforce Tony Arbour's point but also ask you to consider the plight of those small businesses in London who do not operate necessarily from premises but who need to move around the capital to perform their duty. I have become not the target but the recipient of a campaign from the window cleaners of London, many of whom are being caught in a pincer manoeuvre between the European Union and Transport for London in that new ladder health and safety directives coming in from Europe mean that they are having to carry and use much more equipment...

• Question by: Tony Arbour
• Meeting date: 18 June 2008

Thank you for all of that and I know you will deliver on all of those promises. Are you aware that one of the principal threats to small retail businesses in London is in fact Transport for London with its pernicious habit of putting in bus lanes and red routes along parades of retail shops? This is having the most deleterious effect on them and they are being closed very rapidly indeed. In the light of this terrible effect that TfL has I was sorry to hear that you thought that there should be a uniform time for the operation...