• Question by: Roger Evans
• Meeting date: 28 April 2004

I would be interested to hear you expand that argument. Certainly for my residents in Redbridge and Havering, this looks like another mechanism to increase their council tax bills, and yet the money would be spent in other boroughs where you would say the need is greater. They see higher bills and worse services, and they see exactly the same mechanism repeated which you have brought into play on a London-wide basis.

• Question by: Roger Evans
• Meeting date: 28 April 2004

How do you think that places like Hainault, Harold Wood, Wanstead, and outer London areas, can possibly be run by an administration based in Tower Hamlets, where the bureaucrats would have no idea what those places were like? They have little enough idea about the extent of their own borough.

• Question by: Sally Hamwee
• Meeting date: 28 April 2004

Can I make one further point? I was delighted not to have had to pursue the matter because of the Government's statement earlier this week clarifying the relationship between borough Unitary Development Plans and the London Plan. The statement explained that it is where there is `significant harm" that the Unitary Development Plans would be affected, which is not a phrase that has been used before. I think a great deal has been achieved, and you still have your London Plan.

• Question by: Graham Tope
• Meeting date: 28 April 2004

I am not going to be driven down that route today. You have mentioned quangos. The Government Office for London, which is universally disliked in London government, has more power now than it did when the GLA was created. It is responsible for administering 40 spending programmes in London, with expenditure totalling over £2.5 billion last year. How is that evidence that the Government is intent on devolving more powers to the GLA, rather than to GOL?

• Question by: Richard Barnes
• Meeting date: 28 April 2004

The security and safety measures come in many forms and one of them is communication from underground to overground, so that operatives both within LUL's employment, the police and the ambulance service are always in connection with their control room. I raised this issue with you in May 2002. I learned from last week's meeting on London resilience, and from elsewhere, that nothing has changed. The 22 deep Underground stations in London remain inaccessible as far as communications are concerned for the Metropolitan Police Service and the London Ambulance Service. We also learned that commercial considerations are getting in the...

• Question by: Valerie Shawcross
• Meeting date: 28 April 2004

Normally it takes less than five seconds for the Fire Brigade to answer a call. There was no technical breakdown, but obviously if there are literally thousands of calls coming in at that same time it does cause difficulty. The fire brigade then goes into handling its requests differently and responds to them sequentially; in other words, fire engines are dispatched from one incident and then to the next and so on, rather than returning to the station. So there is a procedure for dealing with this, but it was just extensive flash-flooding and not a life-threatening situation on this...

• Question by: Roger Evans
• Meeting date: 28 April 2004

Obviously we would need to have a good response right at the start across the board in the event of an emergency. Will you take a look at the London Fire Brigade switchboard and find out why it was overloaded during last night's flooding? It was taking over 15 minutes for people to get through. Can you try to ensure that is a problem which does not repeat itself when we have other, perhaps more serious emergencies in future?

• Question by: Lynne Featherstone
• Meeting date: 28 April 2004

You have put a lot of faith in Mr O'Toole. Is his contract open-ended?

• Question by: Lynne Featherstone
• Meeting date: 28 April 2004

That allegation was made on 6 April, so perhaps you should check if it is happening. When you touched on the claims about training, the RMT is still saying that it is simply not true that the training is adequate. Where do you stand on this? You are vocalising two sides of the argument, but the complaint is still there.

• Question by: Lynne Featherstone
• Meeting date: 28 April 2004

I understand that, but they are actually on the spot. Is it true that agency and subcontracting staff are walking in and out of LUL premises without any checks whatsoever?