• Question by: Darren Johnson
• Meeting date: 12 September 2007

So you are examining alternatives and modifications if you are looking at increasing toll charges. Are you looking at any of the design modifications as well?

• Question by: Darren Johnson
• Meeting date: 12 September 2007

The adverse effects have been highlighted through the public inquiry and the impact in actually assisting regeneration has been questioned. It is time to look at this whole thing again. TfLs budget is so very tight because of Metronet, so is this really a priority, this huge, huge costly scheme, when other projects promoting sustainable transport are actually being held back?

• Question by: Damian Hockney
• Meeting date: 18 July 2007

One thing that occurs to me - and why I think it sounds like the medieval penances that I think the Greens sometimes describe it as - is that, surely, it encourages people to travel more. If you look at your own travel costs, they multiplied considerably in the last three years. Surely this is the wrong way to do it. If you are genuinely keen on putting less CO2 into the atmosphere what you will do is travel less.

• Question by: Damian Hockney
• Meeting date: 18 July 2007

You mentioned a London scheme. Could you commit to doing, as part of that, an audit of this that is open and makes clear exactly what these schemes are doing? In the meantime, can you commit to not spending any more public money on carbon offsetting until that is done?

• Question by: Damian Hockney
• Meeting date: 18 July 2007

What you are doing then is spending public money - not your own, it is public money - on being able to fly. If you look at the Gleneagles summit, which the Foreign Minister said was carbon neutral; later on, just on very basic investigation, it proved not to be so. There are so many situations where an Evening Standard journalist, a Guardian journalist, will pick up the phone to BP or the Science Museum and say, `You have made a claim on your website about how effective this is', and five minutes later the claim is gone because it...

• Question by: Damian Hockney
• Meeting date: 18 July 2007

The question is, does it adequately cover the carbon cost? That is why we are working on our own scheme. If we stopped doing anything until we got our own scheme there would be a great chorus of disapproval saying we were undermining it. Whilst many of these schemes may be virtually worthless, at least they are there in the public consciousness and it raises awareness that something needs to be done. The objective is to make them worthwhile, rather than to abandon them.

• Question by: Peter Hulme Cross
• Meeting date: 18 July 2007

That is an interesting answer. MI5, as you said, have about 2,000 people under surveillance, and they estimate that about 4,000 British nationals have gone to Pakistan or Afghanistan, to training camps there, and come back into Britain.

• Question by: Andrew Pelling
• Meeting date: 18 July 2007

It does seem that the offer made by the Government on different levels of skills training is not really suitable for London. What can be done to persuade the Government to allow us to have this greater emphasis on Level 1 training?

• Question by: Elizabeth Howlett
• Meeting date: 18 July 2007

Thank you very much. A few of us had a meeting with a couple of Members from your Board and also, on the following day, with Members of the Learning and Skills Council (LSC). They referred to there being 69% employment in London. I turned it round the other way: 31% in London are unemployed. While they assured me that there was no skills shortage as such, because people are being imported from Europe and from other parts of the country to fill these jobs here in London, there are 31% native Londoners who are still on the unemployment register...

• Question by: Andrew Pelling
• Meeting date: 18 July 2007

What implications are there for your Skills Board in terms of the significant change in funding flow of taking LSC funding for 6th forms, up to 18, and turning them to local authorities? Has there been any impact or prospective impact?