• 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'

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

One of the things that you have not really talked about in your answers is that while we bandy around this expression, `learning and skills', nobody actually defines precisely what skills are actually going to do the trick, and help deliver some of the solutions. Am I right in thinking that one of the skills that we need to put much more focus on, if we are going to get more people into work and skilled up, is language in this city of ours. The question - really for Mr Faulkner - is whether he finds that languages do provide...

• Question by: Darren Johnson
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

Can I put that to the rest of the panel? Do you think that it would be useful if all GLA strategies were subject to a poverty impact assessment, and that we take a more across-the-board approach?

• Question by: Darren Johnson
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

There's nothing wrong with leading questions, I think Kate (Green) very helpfully put it on the agenda; I am just exploring this line of inquiry.

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

Bishop, are your sermons subject to one of these impact studies?

• Question by: Darren Johnson
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

So, the Mayor has new powers now on skills, and we've just heard that he is going to be playing a leading role in that. Can I ask the rest of the panel how you see that making a difference in terms of tackling poverty?