• Question by: Bob Neill
• Meeting date: 18 September 2002

Would you accept that, very frequently, you have used Imperial Wharf and Hammersmith and Fulham as being the example of the 50% target being workable, and would you accept that that is demonstrated yet again in the Weatherall report, as being a wholly exceptional case which actually took up two years of the borough's housing grant and had a number of other factors coming together, including the promise of a Tube station which never actually happened, and that you cannot base an overall strategy for London upon a one-off and atypical example? Doesn't that indicate that there is a real...

• Question by: Mike Tuffrey
• Meeting date: 18 September 2002

The reason I'm gloomy is because everything that I see and all these studies that are published, show that we're falling well short of what we need. There was another one this week, the Corporation of London's place in the UK economy from the LSE. A quarter of this report actually focussed on housing, and the critical role it plays in London's economy, and it concludes, "Housing requirements in London, therefore, remain far ahead of potential provision". Another study says that 45,000 units per annum are needed, not the 32,000 that you're working on. So that's yet another study to...

• Question by: Mike Tuffrey
• Meeting date: 18 September 2002

I willingly concede that there is some improvement. Why I keep coming meeting after meeting on this issue is that that falls well short, even under the most optimistic assumptions, of what is actually needed. Did you notice, in the report, that of the survey they conducted: of 22 out of 33 London boroughs, 11 out of 27 developers, 7 out of 10 social landlords and 3 landowners, of all of those only 1 respondent believed that the 50% target was achievable? Do you accept that for a strategy to be successful it has to be credible? Isn't it desperately...

• Question by: Mike Tuffrey
• Meeting date: 18 September 2002

Can I just say that if you have read, you haven't understood the point being made by the study, which does blow a hole below the waterline in the assumptions that are in your plan in terms of the achievability of affordable housing targets. Can I push you on what was perhaps the most worrying thing, for me anyway, that this study reveals about the role of the private sector, in terms of your assumptions? It says that your assumptions do not reflect the real-world behaviour of landowners and developers, pages 4 and 6: 'We believe that landowners are now...

• Question by: Bob Neill
• Meeting date: 18 September 2002

The proportions are the wrong way round perhaps.

• Question by: Bob Neill
• Meeting date: 18 September 2002

You make the point about increasing planning applications. Would you accept that planning applications do not necessarily lead to development because it depends if the developer ultimately thinks what he can get permission for, is worthwhile in terms of proceeding? One way of actually producing real development, as opposed to applications, would be perhaps, to look again at the question of intermediate housing. Would you perhaps accept that not enough work is being done, by yourself or your officers, on encouraging new and more imaginative means of getting low-cost entry into the `housing to buy" market? That"s where the real...

• Question by: Trevor Phillips
• Meeting date: 18 September 2002

I notice you mentioned that you'd been talking to Faulkner and Rooker and so on. The Government's clearly made a major priority of the issue of affordable housing and devoting resources to that; can you say how much of those resources are likely to come London's way, from your discussions with Government?

• Question by: Sally Hamwee
• Meeting date: 18 September 2002

One of the reasons that that funding is needed for transport is because of the huge pressure on commuting into central London, and your plan is very much addressed to the projected increase in jobs in the centre and in inner East London in the city and in the Isle of Dogs. There are many of us who are really concerned about the lack of support for outer London and one of the points that the boroughs made yesterday is that the business services sector incorporates a huge variety of different activities, some large and some small, many of which...

• Question by: Bob Neill
• Meeting date: 18 September 2002

I'm not sure you've yet answered the question as to how you resolve the fact that one of the plan's author's advisers said one thing and one of the plan's authors says another, can you help me as to another contradiction that arose from our meeting yesterday? That is, that we heard evidence from an all-party delegation from the Association of London Government from the London Boroughs, who asserted that the methodology by which your forecasts of employment growth and employment vocations are arrived at are seriously flawed for a number of specific reasons. Similarly, how do you account for...

• Question by: Brian Coleman
• Meeting date: 18 September 2002

Brian Coleman: It's a superb council, that's why. The Mayor: Under Labour leadership for some considerable period of time. Brian Coleman: Now its got an even better one. The Mayor: We'll wait and see whether the jobs continue to come now it's elected a load of nutty right wingers. Brian Coleman: I'm grateful for that compliment.