• Question by: Elizabeth Howlett
• Meeting date: 16 July 2002

Mr Livingstone, my asking a question on housing, I hope, does not open your gambit to castigate Wandsworth again on housing policy. We have been all through all that. Is your office, or maybe the ALG, gathering data on the vacancy level of local authority housing? I know it was very high, on the figures of two years ago, and some local authorities are extremely slow in re-letting or actually making some of their vacant property habitable, and it is a big issue. When we are looking at the numbers game, I think this is one area that should be...

• Question by: Valerie Shawcross
• Meeting date: 16 July 2002

I do think that we should take that forward because I understand from GOL (Government Office for London) that they're not doing any research on it. Any public sector service provider in London will say that is one of the key things, and I would have expected that quintessentially it is a London issue that we ought to be researching and the GLA ought to be taking forward knowledge about how that affects us in London.

• Question by: Mike Tuffrey
• Meeting date: 16 July 2002

Okay, I will invite you to return to that one afterwards. Just concluding this point, that report showed that just five house builders account for more than half the housing units built in London from 1995 to 1999. It is a relatively small number of developers. Are you aware that in many other sectors of the economy, big firms have got together, whether it is the ITT firms to tackle the digital divide, to turn their rhetoric on corporate social responsibility into action? Would you take an initiative to get the house builders in London to set up some sort...

• Question by: Mike Tuffrey
• Meeting date: 16 July 2002

Do you recall that the recommendations were not related so much just to the Spatial Development Strategy but to things like getting them to do proper consultation? Just one suggestion was they should fund a university chair in community consultation and urban regeneration. Have you gone back to them to say, "Okay, that was six months ago, and of these recommendations that you"ve signed up to, which have you now delivered on'?

• Question by: Mike Tuffrey
• Meeting date: 16 July 2002

Can I move on to the role of the private sector as builders and developers. The February report, Speeding Up Delivery, the joint GLA/House Builders Federation report, contained about 40 recommendations, more than a quarter of which, by my reckoning, contain specific commitments from the house builders. What have you done since February to get the developers and the house builders to live up to these commitments?

• Question by: Mike Tuffrey
• Meeting date: 16 July 2002

On many other services, on the business service, there is a case for a single number for London, not 33 numbers. I absolutely agree about the delivery of the service, it is a question of taking the initiative and coordinating it London wide.

• Question by: Valerie Shawcross
• Meeting date: 16 July 2002

I am sure every Londoner welcomed the new announcement about investment in housing in London. However, in the short term, in the current crisis of housing shortage, one of the things I think is most tragic is that we have a very high turnover population, a churn of population, and it seems to be worst in the poorest areas. In Lambeth, overall, about 25% of the population change address in a year, and they are often people moving from bedsits to hostels, sleeping on floors. Do you think this is an issue for the funding of the public sector? It...

• Question by: Bob Neill
• Meeting date: 16 July 2002

Most of us would be open-minded, and we encourage you to be open-minded, about how you achieve it, but my concern is that the concentration of the requirement of 35% for social rented housing, when London already has a fairly significant supply of social rented housing, may not leave enough space for the improvement of supply of cheap housing to buy which is what predominately key workers, who we are losing in London, want to have. How are you going to address that in the Plan?

• Question by: Bob Neill
• Meeting date: 16 July 2002

Would you agree that a good deal of the evidence suggests that the issue of affordability is particularly important for people who want to be able to afford to start to buy, to get on the purchase ladder? And do you think that a target of only 15% in the intermediate housing sector is sufficient to meet that, or should that be given greater priority?

• Question by: Mike Tuffrey
• Meeting date: 16 July 2002

I take it then you would welcome some ideas?