• Question by: Brian Coleman
• Meeting date: 18 June 2003

If we can come back to the issue of funding for London's services. I am sure you welcomed the settlement of the Fire Brigade dispute, although I do not think you actually contributed to bringing that dispute to a quicker conclusion. Do you recognise the pressures there are on the Fire Service budget in London? The pay settlement in 2003/2004 will cost an extra £2 million. The development of integrated fire risk management planning, which I am sure you welcome along with us all, will impose significant costs and budgetary pressures on LFEPA, particularly if the Government fails to come...

• Question by: Elizabeth Howlett
• Meeting date: 18 June 2003

Giving £20 billion a year; you cannot get it back.

• Question by: Elizabeth Howlett
• Meeting date: 18 June 2003

Mr Mayor, if you were re?elected and if we start getting Assemblies up in the North and so on, and London is giving out £20 billion a year, what would you feel about Londoners paying for all these Assemblies in the North?

• Question by: Valerie Shawcross
• Meeting date: 18 June 2003

Can I put on record my thanks to the whole of the Assembly and to the Mayor for their support to the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority during the difficult year of the dispute. I am sure we all welcome the fact that we now have a win?win settlement and we have a chance to significantly improve the Fire Service in London, plus the firefighters have a good pay settlement and a good London weighting settlement. You might take some comfort from the fact that with the £30 million transitional funding that has been promised by the Government. As...

• Question by: Angie Bray
• Meeting date: 18 June 2003

): I am sorry, but a Transport for London spokesman is quoted as saying: `They are giving with one hand and taking away with the other. It is unlikely to encourage other Councils to take up congestion charging." So they have definitely linked the loss of money from the Central Government grant to your Congestion Charge. That is a link that Transport for London themselves have made. Indeed you answered to one of my written questions that in future you would have to do rather better at making sure the negotiations are in place than you had done hitherto.

• Question by: Mike Tuffrey
• Meeting date: 18 June 2003

I would like to ask about widening our tax revenue base in London to help pay for this funding gap. The response you made to the Government's White Paper back in 1998 indeed makes fascinating reading. And not just in terms of the commitment not to seek a second term, and your delightfully optimistic comment that the use of proportional representation to elect the Mayor in the Assembly will undoubtedly reduce the confrontational system of politics, but there were two other things.

• Question by: Angie Bray
• Meeting date: 18 June 2003

And so it is never going to happen again is what you are saying, and now all the money we want is going to come our way?

• Question by: Angie Bray
• Meeting date: 18 June 2003

No your expectations of the Government bailing you out.

• Question by: Angie Bray
• Meeting date: 18 June 2003

You are being reckless with people's money.

• Question by: Angie Bray
• Meeting date: 18 June 2003

): Which is why you should be rather less reckless with your expectations.