• Question by: Lynne Featherstone
• Meeting date: 26 March 2003

It pains me to agree with my colleague, John Biggs, but -- John Biggs: It's bad news for me too! Lynne Featherstone: -- but he is on the right track here and I think you will find the Assembly scrutiny on Tube investigation on Mind the Gap very helpful in informing your vision about service standards for London. I trust you have read it. What isn't going to be satisfactory is that every time a standard is talked about, if the Mayor says, "Can't do because of the PPP", I actually think London is going to expect something from the...

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

So the trains will come on time?

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

Do you want 24-hour services? Do you want smoking cars, first-class carriages? What service proposals do you have? You should set these out.

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

You're claiming you have no knowledge of these things. That's ridiculous. We've been through these arguments before but the basic problem is about vision and policy for London's Tube. Your Transport Strategy includes vision and policy for all manner of things you don't control; should you not have issued something long ago, in the last year, about what you are going to do with the Tube to make it better so that in the run-up to the next election Londoners can hold you to account and say, "That Ken"s a good bloke, he's delivered a better Tube for us'?

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

Sadly, I think I am going to have to break with my tradition and be critical of you on this point because I think there is a very real problem. If we read your Transport Strategy for London it includes all manner of proposals for things that you don't control, for the National Rail system, for buildings which don't exist and for which there is no funding in place, and I think that it is long overdue that you set in front of Londoners your proposals for how you're going to manage the Tube and how it will be better...

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

In any case, I'd like to return to the issue of 24-hour operation of the Tube because you have said that you can't do it under the PPP. Obviously it was a big issue at the last Mayoral election and it was something that you promised at that time. Why is it that PPP prevents us from doing that and do you see any ways around the PPP system that might allow us perhaps to operate some parts of the Tube over 24 hours or perhaps to operate 24 hours, as my colleague Angie Bray suggests, at certain times?

• Question by: Jennette Arnold OBE
• Meeting date: 26 March 2003

Can I make this statement that I am totally committed to the minicab and the black cab? I see them as much an essential part of the transport choice as anything else. Given that we know that in a recession people go to this area of work, what are officers at TfL doing to ensure that people entering this industry (a) are referred to, say, the Learning Skills Council or (b) they are given a lot of help to pay for their licence, their learning, their training? It seems to me that it's an opportunity that TfL are missing in...

• Question by: Jennette Arnold OBE
• Meeting date: 26 March 2003

Thank you for that answer. I do appreciate that there was this extra round. But I do want to ask you whether there is something that we can do about this slippage. I think this is important - can I just remind you and others - because there was a recent case where a woman was raped by a minicab driver, working for a licensed private operator in east London, and the investigation found that the driver had obtained his job using a false licence and insurance documents. The court then heard that 18 of the 32 employees could not...

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

It's good news to hear that progress is being made on licensing but of course that is meaningless without enforcement. At an enforcement exercise last year in Gants Hill, the police and licensing authorities caught not only a lot of unlicensed drivers but they also uncovered, as part of that, unfit vehicles, insurance fraud, immigration fraud, benefit fraud and a couple of serious criminal offenders, as well. Obviously that was a successful exercise on our part. Will we get the resources again to do another of these in Gants Hill or elsewhere in Redbridge where the problem still continues?

• Question by: Jenny Jones
• Meeting date: 26 March 2003

I'm really pleased to hear about the Yellow Pages initiative; I think that's excellent. How else is this being enforced, as far as the companies are concerned? Do you have any information on that? Are people checking on the streets?