• Question by: Roger Evans
• Meeting date: 17 March 2004

Something else that I was concerned about when I visited was the condition of a lot of the equipment that is used for training there. I was told by one of the managers there that one of their visitors had recognised some of the machinery as what he used to use at Ford before he retired. Now, clearly that is not what we should be expecting from a centre of excellence. Will that be something that will be addressed sooner rather than later?

• Question by: Meg Hillier
• Meeting date: 17 March 2004

If the LDA is the agency, what resources are you going to need to be able to deliver?

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 17 March 2004

• Question by: Meg Hillier
• Meeting date: 17 March 2004

Just to be clear, you want a single UDC covering the Lower Lea Valley, with the LDA as the agency?

• Question by: Meg Hillier
• Meeting date: 17 March 2004

I wanted to ask, and I suppose it is directed mostly at Tony (Winterbottom), how the LDA sees its role in supporting an Urban Development Corporation (UDC) for east London, and how does it see its role in that, particularly in the Olympic scenario, or alternatively the non-Olympic scenario?

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 17 March 2004

Business start-ups and SMEs set up, particularly by minority ethnic communities in east London, have been pretty fundamental in the last 20 years or so, and yet, if I look through East Ham, West Ham and Tower Hamlets, the sort of premises they used to occupy have disappeared. The ones that are now available are unaffordable. How are the LDA and the other partnerships going to intervene in that?

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 17 March 2004

Perhaps I should declare that I was at that partnership board as well, and I welcome the work that you are doing on this. But my constituents in east London can, I think, be forgiven for being a bit cynical about regeneration in the area, because it is all very well to get investment bankers there, but very few local kids become investment bankers and the arrival of investment bankers very often, by driving up the land values, forces out SMEs in traditional old workshops, which have been a classic leg-up for people in east London in the past. They...

• Question by: Roger Evans
• Meeting date: 17 March 2004

Recently I paid a visit to one of your flagship projects, the Centre of Excellence for Manufacturing and Engineering (CEME), which is just inside my own constituency in Havering. I was impressed with the building, which is quite a smart piece of architecture, but there were a lot of problems with the running of the building, rather like any new building these days it would seem. When I went the heating was not working; there was a lot of space that was under-utilised. What is being done to actually make that place work properly, and to get more involvement from...

• Question by: Roger Evans
• Meeting date: 17 March 2004

Do you share that view?

• Question by: Elizabeth Howlett
• Meeting date: 25 February 2004

When the preparations were put in place for the SARS virus, which in fact we knew had jumped the species and was transferable from person to person, we discovered that in London there were not enough isolation rooms which were cut off from the air-conditioning. With a virulent respiratory virus the rooms must be cut off from the air-conditioning because that is a method of transference. In fact, with your joint chairmanship of London Resilience perhaps you could take that on board and find out just how many isolation rooms we have which are totally cut off from the rest...