• Question by: Eric Ollerenshaw
• Meeting date: 26 March 2003

Hang on. Didn't he work for us when he did this scheme? So, isn't the scheme ours or is it his scheme?

• Question by: Eric Ollerenshaw
• Meeting date: 26 March 2003

Livingstone goes international.

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 26 March 2003

I am not so sure all Londoners would agree with you, Mayor, that it would be a good thing for Derek to have a comfortable retirement. Having said that, he is clearly a person who has managed to get things done in London. Two questions to you rolled into one: first, is it not reckless to get rid of him when the congestion charge is so newly in place? We are still not convinced that it's going to sail along swimmingly, without any problems, into the future. There is still a risk of problems and he is the man who...

• Question by: Roger Evans
• Meeting date: 26 March 2003

Thank you, Chair. You will be reassured, Mr Mayor, to know that I have had a reply to the letter which was quoted in the question; it arrived by fax yesterday from TfL headquarters, coincidentally, along with another of my letters which had been outstanding from a couple of days later in October. I still, however, have other queries with TfL which are outstanding from the same period. Do you not think it is completely unacceptable that we need to raise these issues with you, as Mayor, before we can get Bob Kiley to clear his in-tray?

• Question by: Tony Arbour
• Meeting date: 26 March 2003

That, of course, Mr Mayor, is not the burden of my question. I, of course, am extremely familiar with what happens in the London Borough of Hounslow; what I very much regret is that only particular kinds of people were invited to take part in this no doubt very useful ceremony but the thing that they all had in common was that they were officials and apparatchiks of the London Labour Party. Will you investigate what happened and issue, in your role as Chairman of TfL, instructions that this may not happen again?

• Question by: Tony Arbour
• Meeting date: 26 March 2003

On the 14th of this month there was the opening of a pedestrian footbridge at Harlington Road East in the London Borough of Hounslow. TfL did not invite the great and the good to this; it was passed over to Nicky Gavron's office. Nicky Gavron did indeed attend the opening of this footbridge accompanied by various Labour Party worthies. I understand from TfL that they passed this over to the Deputy Mayor's office and the Deputy Mayor then passed the business of arranging invitations over to the London Labour Party which no doubt accounts for the fact that the only...

• Question by: Tony Arbour
• Meeting date: 26 March 2003

It's very nice to hear TfL accepting they are at fault. I may say that I haven't yet received the replies to those letters but I can live in hope. I wonder if I could ask you whether or not their lack of competence in replying to letters also applies to their inability to draw up guest lists for TfL events?

• Question by: Angie Bray
• Meeting date: 26 March 2003

We can't keep going back to your rosy memories of the past, Mr Livingstone. The fact is that those were the facts before your bus route went in and you're saying that it's your bus route that should be accommodated even though the vast majority of the people living in that road, without wanting to oppose the bus route itself, nevertheless suggest that you have ignored all the evidence that they gave you before you put it in there that it would jam the place up.

• Question by: Angie Bray
• Meeting date: 26 March 2003

You are therefore requiring the council to overturn the practice of many decades of parking arrangements in order to accommodate your one bus route which everybody said they didn't particularly want up that road. They want the bus route but not up that road.

• Question by: Roger Evans
• Meeting date: 26 March 2003

Perhaps you could just tell me the number of services that have improved and the number that haven't.