• Question by: Jennette Arnold OBE
• Meeting date: 22 October 2003

A point of information. Will the Mayor tell us how he is going to keep Assembly Members informed? Will it be a weekly direct bulletin from you to Members? Can you tell us how you are going to keep us informed? It would be much better than listening to you on the radio.

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 22 October 2003

I think it is a matter of wide knowledge that the reason there was no scrutiny into this is because the debate on it would have been largely a name-calling and ideologically driven debate between different factions of politics in London. I think that illustrates the unsatisfactory nature ultimately of the PPP. As you know, Labour members supported it but we supported it with a number of checks attached to it, the fundamental one being about safety. Rather than name-calling today, we need to ask ourselves as Londoners whether we got it right on safety, which is obviously what people...

• Question by: Samantha Heath
• Meeting date: 22 October 2003

Tube Lines.

• Question by: Brian Coleman
• Meeting date: 22 October 2003

Your officers have not responded to requests from Barnet officers, and your office has not responded to my request made at 10 o'clock on Monday morning. On the Red Routes that you control on the A41 and A1 can you take emergency traffic order powers to increase the usage of the bus lane, for instance, outside just the rush hour so that the bus lane can operate all day, and suspend the parking provisions on those roads. I know it will affect traders, but this is the only way we are going to get the buses moving down the A1...

• Question by: Lynne Featherstone
• Meeting date: 22 October 2003

We agree on that.

• Question by: Lynne Featherstone
• Meeting date: 22 October 2003

I am not here to answer questions, but everyone in the world looked at the PPP and everyone found it to be wanting. I am no lover of the PPP as you know. That is not the point. You are now responsible. We can all slag off the Government, and indeed I have slagged off the Government for its part in the PPP, but now you are Mayor of London, the Tube has been transferred and we were assured under the PPP that we, or you in this case, would have absolute responsibility for safety and that the safety of...

• Question by: Eric Ollerenshaw
• Meeting date: 22 October 2003

Nobody underestimates the position that you are in at the moment and that you actually did fight against the PPP and then the Government forced you to sign it. That situation is there. Obviously, it must be a hell of a burden at the moment. But at what stage, given I think it was either Tim O'Toole or Bob Kiley who said at a press conference, yesterday, that he has been waiting something like months and months and months for information from some of the Infracos or a particular Infraco when do you see yourself actually having to make that...

• Question by: Darren Johnson
• Meeting date: 22 October 2003

But if the evidence is that it is clearly the PPP, will you be calling on the Government to introduce that primary legislation?

• Question by: Darren Johnson
• Meeting date: 22 October 2003

These recent derailments may or may not be connected with the PPP. How long do things need to carry on the way they are? How bad do things need to get? How many derailments do we have to have before you actually pronounce the PPP as unworkable and call upon the Government to look again with a blank sheet of paper at a proper unified system for running the Tube?

• Question by: Lynne Featherstone
• Meeting date: 22 October 2003

Well, listen to this: `TfL agrees the safety case for the Tube with the HSE, RMT and ASLEF. TfL remains responsible for the safety case. It is nobody else's responsibility and if the Infracos will not do their job (case not proven at the moment) it is TfL's fault for not having adequate systems in place to check." The Mayor as Chair of TfL is responsible; not the Infracos, not the Government. The buck stops with you, so what are you going to do?