• Question by: Graham Tope
• Meeting date: 20 February 2008

Is this a commitment or an aspiration for the next four years if you are elected?

• Question by: Graham Tope
• Meeting date: 20 February 2008

Not the crime that Londoners experience. Go ahead and ask Londoners whether they feel that there has been a 20% reduction in crime? Of course they do not feel that because that actual crime has not reduced by that amount.

• Question by: Graham Tope
• Meeting date: 20 February 2008

That is a good target to have. You set a target in 2004 that you would have reduced by now crime by 50%. Whatever measure you use you have lamentably failed on that one.

• Question by: Graham Tope
• Meeting date: 20 February 2008

Excuse me, Mr Mayor, you have reduced recorded crime, not actual crime.

• Question by: Graham Tope
• Meeting date: 20 February 2008

No, I was concentrating on this election and suggesting that as you failed over the last four years you should do ' you quoted Brian Paddick, not me ' as he has said, 'I have failed in my aspiration. I will therefore not seek re-election'. It might cause some concern to the Chair of the London Labour Party but I challenge you to do that.

• Question by: Graham Tope
• Meeting date: 20 February 2008

Will you also repeat and accept for yourself the other part of Brian Paddick's commitment; that if he failed to meet that target he would not seek re-election? Perhaps you should apply that to what you stated on the record four years ago, announce that you have failed and not seek re-election?

• Question by: Damian Hockney
• Meeting date: 20 February 2008

Unless I know something that nobody else seems to know. What I was really asking for was the letter you had sent to the Metropolitan Police Service, because the Metropolitan Police Service has responded to your letter saying that because you do not make any criminal allegations they are not going to investigate it.

• Question by: Graham Tope
• Meeting date: 20 February 2008

Mr Mayor, we should compare our surveys. I have the figures here in front of me for the British Crime Survey since 2002 which show that they are on a plateau, both for household crime and for personal crime, and that in the last six years, in contrast to reported crime, they have not fallen at all.

• Question by: Graham Tope
• Meeting date: 20 February 2008

Whichever way we dress up these figures, actual crime experienced by Londoners has not dropped and has certainly not dropped by anything remotely like the 50% you aspired to, on the record, four years ago. Follow Brian Paddick; say if you fail to achieve the commitment you gave four years ago you will not seek re-election.

• Question by: Graham Tope
• Meeting date: 20 February 2008

You yourself say the British Crime Survey provides a reliable measure of crime. Recorded crime provides a measure only of crimes reported.