• Question by: Geoff Pope
• Meeting date: 15 March 2006

I have a couple of questions about money. You mentioned the ELL phase two extension. Is that dependent on the Government's 2007 expenditure assessment?

• Question by: Geoff Pope
• Meeting date: 15 March 2006

Do you think it might be funded shortly?

• Question by: Geoff Pope
• Meeting date: 15 March 2006

When do we expect to get a decision from the Government?

• Question by: Geoff Pope
• Meeting date: 15 March 2006

If you can find out, that would be helpful. There have been proposals for an extension to the Tube service in South London, such as an extension to the Bakerloo Line from Elephant and Castle to Camberwell. I would imagine that is going to be quite expensive, is it not?

• Question by: Geoff Pope
• Meeting date: 15 March 2006

There is certainly an amount of good will. It is not our railway. In the last set of changes to railway management, the DfT, in effect, took over direct control with the appointment of a Director General 27 of Railways (Dr Mike Mitchell) within the DfT, so it is their system: Network Rail's assets and infrastructure, the Government's franchises with the train operating companies (TOCs). There are two ways we can do that. We can either take real control as we are going to do with the NLR and specify the franchise within the limits of the capacity of the...

• Question by: Geoff Pope
• Meeting date: 15 March 2006

It is not in the findings then.

• Question by: Darren Johnson
• Meeting date: 15 March 2006

They are providing very good value for money, are they not?

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 15 March 2006

Perhaps we could deal with this quite briefly. Just to give perhaps a slightly different perspective on this, those of us who represent the north side of the Thames tend to have fewer problems with the Thames Gateway Bridge than those on the south side. I think that is understandable, although the fact is that there is a fear that the bridge will be used for massive tidal flows of commuter traffic, which is what the charging is there for. That is a problem with the Blackwall Tunnel. Would you confirm that the Thames Gateway Bridge is part of a...

• Question by: Darren Johnson
• Meeting date: 15 March 2006

): I fully understand that you cannot pre-empt every single issue, but surely TfL should be able to remember the price of their own Congestion Charge, which they set, when they are giving evidence to a public inquiry? You say that is a complete red herring, but the traffic modelling figures for Bexley have shown already that very small changes in assumptions can lead to very significant effects. Consequently, are you going to run that modelling again based on the correct price for Congestion Charging rather than the £5 assumption that you made?

• Question by: Bob Neill
• Meeting date: 15 March 2006

): I am grateful for that. Perhaps we can talk about the detail later. The other thing I wanted to raise was that one thing that changed in TfL's stance during the inquiry was to reduce the area of the discounted toll within Bexley to make it much smaller. However, a lot of my constituents say that given that their main concern is traffic coming from the north of the river to the south, they find it difficult to work out how reducing the amount of discount that is available to us living here on the receiving end is going...