• Question by: Murad Qureshi
• Meeting date: 12 July 2006

Chairman, can I declare an interest, as a Board Member of Sports England for the London region. I have been quite actively involved in trying to increase the physical activity of Londoners through the activities of Sports England, and it is pretty broad based across all the age groups and I think that is critical as much as concentrating on schools, although I am going to do that right now. Over this weekend I went to the London Youth Games, and it was quite interesting that the outer London boroughs did much, much better than the inner city boroughs on...

• Question by: Jenny Jones
• Meeting date: 12 July 2006

What I am trying to get from you is some sort of commitment towards actually taking an overview on this and trying to encourage people. If you think about waste, for example, for some time you said you had no responsibility or no rights in that area, and yet you have now taken a lead and you have actually got things moving. Could you not do this on sports facilities, otherwise we are going to be a laughing stock I think. In Hackney 80% of children leave primary school without being able to swim, because they do not have the...

• Question by: Murad Qureshi
• Meeting date: 12 July 2006

There is one case in point, Holland Park Comprehensive, which has undoubtedly drawn a lot of attention, and will come under your nose, but apart from school playing fields, there are playing fields being lost in the rest of the public sector; for example, all the old Illier playing fields that I grew up on are virtually gone now. Something drastic does need to be done and I would suggest it is something which you could make some commitment to in the London Plan. I think that would be welcomed by the sporting community.

• Question by: Jenny Jones
• Meeting date: 12 July 2006

Why can't you take a lead in this? You have got strategic oversight, and the fact is you could go to the boroughs and you could ask them to put a minimum provision of sports facilities.

• Question by: Darren Johnson
• Meeting date: 12 July 2006

Why do you only seem to oppose leisure centre closures if they are Conservative or Liberal Democrat closures and not Labour closures?

• Question by: Jenny Jones
• Meeting date: 12 July 2006

I am glad you have got some hopeful targets, but the fact is we are actually seeing a reduction in sports facilities in London at the moment, and the figures are in this excellent report that the Greens have published; in fact at every athletics track there are 200,000 Londoners who might use it, for every pool in London there are 60,000 who might use it, and these facilities are diminishing. I am sure you know that London has got two Olympic-sized swimming pools, whilst Paris has got 18 and Berlin has got 19. We are sadly, woefully behind. How...

• Question by: Bob Blackman
• Meeting date: 12 July 2006

Mr Mayor, one of the things you can do is to start the expansion of proposals to encourage people to participate in sport outside of the five so-called Olympic Boroughs, for example expanding the `kids swim for free' scheme. Are you proposing to do that?

• Question by: Jenny Jones
• Meeting date: 12 July 2006

In that case could you at least take the message to Government, along with all these other messages that we ask you to take, that we are actually having a reduced number of facilities?

• Question by: Joanne McCartney
• Meeting date: 12 July 2006

Yes, sports participation and health; and one of the things they said to us is that they hoped to get a member of staff to drive through the sports participation and health, but they need a budget to do that and that has to be from the Government, and I was wondering whether you would back them in that bid?

• Question by: Bob Blackman
• Meeting date: 12 July 2006

One of the areas that you can encourage is private sector investment; swimming pools by their very nature lose money, but private sector investors are prepared to do it. However, one of the problems is the interference from your office on planning applications that would have a swimming pool plus other facilities. Are you prepared to relax those arrangements to encourage the development of sports facilities?