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

Could we find these figures?

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

I am talking about beyond the Plan, getting them, where they have published grand statements of how socially responsible they are as corporations, to actually put up. I think there is a role, would you not agree, for your office in actually asking those questions and getting them together in quite a high profile way at the London-wide level.

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

My concern is about the standards in the private rented sector. Why not have a hotline for people with difficulties with their landlords, worried about those landlords and so forth? Do you agree, for example, with the suggestion of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors who also in May called for a system of independent arbitration between landlords and tenants when they are in dispute? Isn't there a role for the Mayor to get the key players to step up to the mark on that sort of initiative?

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

My concern is that you may favour it but it seems to me you have not actually done anything. You have not told us this morning what you have actually done since the December 2000 Housing Commission report. For example, that Shelter report in May of this year recommended having a code of management practice to ensure landlords set fit and proper standards and recommended having an independent best practice guide. You referred earlier to your empty property hotline which is being funded. Why are you not funding an initiative to get the private landlords within London to come up...

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

Can I thank the Mayor for that answer, and I would like to focus my supplementary questions on the role of the private sector, starting particularly with the private rented sector. Indeed, you have referred to the Housing Commission and one of the conclusions of that, a key finding of our report, is the importance of modernising the private rented sector. Given that, are you aware that the Housing Forum for London, which you have just referred to, at the conference in February said one of the four priority themes for the Forum is making use of the private rented...

• 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?