• Question by: Darren Johnson
• Meeting date: 11 October 2006

Acknowledging that brownfield land can have environmental value and community value, when you are dealing with development decisions currently, how do you take that into account?

• Question by: Darren Johnson
• Meeting date: 11 October 2006

Would that include an appraisal then of the current environmental value and potential community value?

• Question by: Nicky Gavron
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

Scandinavian countries have poverty rates which are close to zero, so it obviously is eminently preventable. Would you like to comment on that?

• Question by: Brian Coleman
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

Moving on to the question of European Union (EU) Structural Funding and how it benefits London, is there a danger that we may miss out on the next tranche of funding? Who is our expert on the EU Structural Fund? Mr Faulkner?

• Question by: Damian Hockney
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

Obviously you all know my opinions on the EU and Structural Funds. It is a very bureaucratic, arthritic way of getting back a tiny proportion of the money that we have to give to the EU. Would it not be nice to have all of that money here to be able to do the things we would like to do with poverty, with unemployment, and so on? It's not an ideal way, and are we not going to lose a lot of that in the next aspects of funding, because a lot of the accession countries are going to take...

• Question by: Damian Hockney
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

Do any of you know how our Structural Fund for Objective Two or Three, in London has been used to deal with things like poverty? Anything you could point to: that is a marvellous idea, or that is a very bad idea?

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

I would like to take a slightly less negative approach than the UK Independence Party (UKIP) on this issue. The ability of EU funds to transform other areas of Europe where there is experience of poverty has been quite significant, and, given that there are areas of considerable poverty within London, and you may not be able to answer this, but can you think of examples of good practice elsewhere and has, for example, the Child Poverty Action Group, looked at examples of good practice in other European states which could be echoed and mirrored and copied and stolen to...

• Question by: Brian Coleman
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

Did I hear you correctly, Mr Faulkner, did you say that in your view the LSC had been successful?

• Question by: Elizabeth Howlett
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

What I wanted to ask about is the skills shortage that there is in London, and, Mr Ross, you touched on that at the very start of this meeting. There are whole areas of skills in the building trade which we do not have any longer, and so, therefore, people from Europe are walking into jobs here instead of the indigenous population. What I was going to suggest to the Mayor, now he is in charge of the Learning and Skills Board and stuff, and the new strategy, why do we not think of going back to the apprenticeship scheme...

• Question by: Angie Bray
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

Can I just ask: how helpful is it to encourage everybody to speak the language here, in order to help their employment opportunities, to be consistently increasing the number of times which we produce all of our documentation'