• Question by: Jenny Jones
• Meeting date: 21 May 2003

Ken, Crossrail is clearly taking up your time and energy and your team's time and energy. Is it worthwhile, when you have a project like Orbirail which could be done fairly cheaply and quickly, as far as railway is concerned? It would also relieve pressure on central London and would give you some part of your London Plan; it would also bring some huge benefits to some deprived communities along that route.

• Question by: Bob Neill
• Meeting date: 21 May 2003

You told the Planning and SDS Committee last year that, unless Crossrail was delivered, you might as well rip up the London Plan and start again. You said that, without it, the London Plan would be inoperative. The London Plan runs effectively until 2020, 2016 all the figures; it is clear now from the Secretary of State that there is no prospect of Crossrail being delivered until the very end of the London Plan period. Are you going to rip up your plan and start again, or were you spoofing us all along?

• Question by: Richard Barnes
• Meeting date: 21 May 2003

BAA has just published its response to the RUCATSE report, which included a positive statement about a fourth runway at Heathrow, which everybody ignores, and the need for another terminal if that was built. How would that impact on Crossrail and your congestion charges? Do you support one and not the other?

• Question by: Mike Tuffrey
• Meeting date: 21 May 2003

Does the letter actually spell out in hard terms what they are going to contribute? Can you tell us what share of the bid costs are likely to be met by the private sector?

• Question by: Eric Ollerenshaw
• Meeting date: 21 May 2003

Given the importance of the London Development Agency in all this, and all the comings and goings of officers etcetera, including the change in Chairmanship at the LDA, is it you re-shaping the LDA to perform its new function of drawing up the Masterplan for the Olympics and changing where it spends its money? Or is that your view that the LDA would not be competent to do that without all these changes?

• Question by: Meg Hillier
• Meeting date: 21 May 2003

If I could just pick up on the legacy issues again if you are going to be talking to the CBI and business. I am sure people in some of the other agencies are having some of these discussions about local interest, but in terms of the facilities that will be built and either run or adapted after the event, I would be glad if you could be raising very firmly at this stage the input that business needs to make in that. If we rely solely on a public sector regeneration scheme it may not be sustainable in the...

• Question by: Mike Tuffrey
• Meeting date: 21 May 2003

Would you agree that they are more likely to come to the table and have serious discussions with you if they thought Government was serious about changing the law of the land to allow some of the development gains that come out of these big infrastructure projects to be captured? Would you agree that the discussions or the noises coming out of the Government so far in terms of legislative change fall short of what we actually need to get some of this private profit captured to fund these development issues, whether it is the Olympics or Crossrail?

• Question by: Mike Tuffrey
• Meeting date: 21 May 2003

): I feared as much. Can I urge you to put them on the spot because all the projections put forward about the cost?benefit analysis on the Games as a whole show that the costs fall to the public sector, and if the Games go into profit the gains fall to the private sector, and yet up to now they have not been fingered to contribute anything towards the costs. So could you put them on the spot in relation to the bid itself? Would you also put them on the spot in relation to going back to Central Government...

• Question by: Sally Hamwee
• Meeting date: 21 May 2003

I believe that that has been tried but what you get on the website is not the full consultation document.

• Question by: Lynne Featherstone
• Meeting date: 21 May 2003

Well I think we have tried that.