• Question by: Jenny Jones
• Meeting date: 14 January 2004

It is really not that simple, is it? Because, when you encourage people and give them the opportunity to drive, they will do it. What we have to do is always offer other options. What I am wondering is, perhaps the London Plan guidelines are actually too generous and we should be re-thinking those.

• Question by: Jenny Jones
• Meeting date: 14 January 2004

That is a very kind offer, but we are a bit stretched at the moment as well. Many parts of London are not actually going to reach the 2005 EU limit on air quality. What you are actually doing is permitting any car parking spaces to go through. You are actually likely to be at a point where London cannot reach those limits, and these are legally binding limits. What happens then? Somebody surely should be advising you that you are actually reaching the point when the social and environmental impact of all these car parking spaces is actually illegal.

• Question by: Jenny Jones
• Meeting date: 14 January 2004

Okay. I've been told, you can tell me if this is true or not, that you do not actually keep any sort of tally on how many car spaces you commit on each development, i.e. that they are all taken as individual developments and you do not keep a tally.

• Question by: Jenny Jones
• Meeting date: 14 January 2004

You talk about a percentage cut that TfL is seeking. What sort of percentage are we talking about?

• Question by: Lynne Featherstone
• Meeting date: 14 January 2004

What I do want from you on the bridge is to stop saying that if you do not want it to be six lanes of traffic and you want it to be a tram, which is a much better place to put a tram than the bus way that you are proposing - if you do not want that, then you are hurting the people of east London, because it is not that no one wants a bridge. As you have got in the consultation when you asked, 85% of people want a bridge. Of course, they bloody want a...

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 14 January 2004

This site is of course in the heart of my constituency, and so I have a parochial interest in it. But what concerns me in Jenny's (Jones) question are two things. The first is that she is so uncompromising and in reality you need to achieve a balance; and the second is that she is ignoring the scale of development here. This is a site that is about half the size of the City of London, where we are proposing to have 4,500 homes, 1,500,000 square feet of retail, 4,500,000 of offices, over a million square feet of hotel spaces...

• Question by: Roger Evans
• Meeting date: 14 January 2004

Can you give us an update on the proposal to build a coach park on East Marsh in Hackney, which is probably even closer to Stratford than Poplar?

• Question by: Roger Evans
• Meeting date: 14 January 2004

Thank you, Chair. It is good to see the Mayor's support for these measures, which will help people who drive their cars and who are passengers in them in East London. It is interesting in the Mayor's response to Jenny (Jones) that he consistently says that working class people do not have cars, when all the evidence suggests that actually very often they are more dependent on their cars than people with higher incomes. Would you consider doing some research on that and changing your viewpoint, Mayor, because it really does not reflect reality?

• Question by: Lynne Featherstone
• Meeting date: 14 January 2004

Okay, but if you come back to the Thames Gateway Bridge argument that you put, I get very annoyed..

• Question by: Lynne Featherstone
• Meeting date: 14 January 2004

I want to use public transport, and I am just concerned that provision of such a huge car park is basically going to mean that the long-distance commuters from Kent and Essex coming over the six-lane motorway that you are creating will go and park there.