• Question by: Jenny Jones
• Meeting date: 11 December 2002

I will come back to walking and cycling. We all know we had the 50th anniversary of the London smog last week. The fact is that although we don't have smog anymore, we certainly do have a fairly lethal mix of toxins in the air of London, which not only triggers breathing disorders, asthma in children and so on, but also shortens our lives. What do you think in the Transport Strategy is actually going to help the quality of air in London?

• Question by: Jenny Jones
• Meeting date: 11 December 2002

It's all very well getting people out of their cars, onto their bikes and onto walking, but if they're still going to die from toxic fumes, it actually doesn't help very much. I'm also concerned that in fact there isn't enough emphasis put on encouraging walking and cycling.

• Question by: Jenny Jones
• Meeting date: 11 December 2002

I am just concerned - I didn't know you didn't have any input into the Air Quality Strategy, and I'm actually fairly concerned about that, because I think perhaps that might be part of your role.

• Question by: Jennette Arnold OBE
• Meeting date: 11 December 2002

Neale, I have got a question and it is about an issue that has political support in the form of the buy-in from the Mayor but there's been little follow-up support from Transport for London. The matter I'm raising is, it's a year since the publication of the London Road Safety Plan and in the summer, I raised an issue at Mayor's Question Time, which came as a result of work that I had done with the NSPCC. That was about road fatalities and casualties. Now, although there has been an actionl point in the Plan, we've seen absolutely no...

• Question by: Jenny Jones
• Meeting date: 11 December 2002

I do hope that when the economic discussion is had on things like low emission zones, you actually come in and explain the benefit to the NHS of actually keeping people healthier, rather than poisoning them.

• Question by: Jenny Jones
• Meeting date: 11 December 2002

The fact is, the Mayor is prepared to build on open space, and I think this is appalling. For example, the development of Patterson Park, albeit a school, was an instance where a piece of open space was taken away and some very sub-standard little corners of land were given as an excuse for some sort of compensation. I just think the Mayor's green credentials on this are going to be very damaged.

• Question by: Jenny Jones
• Meeting date: 11 December 2002

Protecting something that's already vulnerable is admirable, but actually preventing open space ever being built on is something else. That is not stated in the Plan. I've got a figure here that 90% of new housing in London is built on brown field sites. That means that 10% isn't. 10% is actually on open space. To me, that's appalling, that we're losing any open space at all. Once you have lost it, it's gone for ever. Do you recognise that figure?

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 11 December 2002

I find your answers very satisfactory on the broad issue of open space use and the way it's being treated through the Mayor's policies. Where I think there is a troublesome area which has come up again and again in referrals to the Mayor, is where there are uses ancillary to housing, be it education or health, where local authorities find themselves driven to - in the scrappy process of finding bits of land that they can put new schools on or new health facilities which need to support new housing - they find they are tempted to snap away...

• Question by: Jenny Jones
• Meeting date: 11 December 2002

I think it's because the land requirements for the Plan and its development are not actually calculated at any stage, and nor is the availability of the amount of brown field sites at the moment. So, we don't actually know what quantity of land the Plan will actually take. Now, there is actually no target in the London Plan -- I'm suggesting there should be a 100% target for all housing to be built on brown field sites. That doesn't exist. There is no target. That means that open land is vulnerable.

• Question by: Eric Ollerenshaw
• Meeting date: 11 December 2002

I suppose it depends on the definition of open space, doesn't it? The question I asked the Mayor at the last Assembly meeting was about council estates facing regeneration and redevelopment and facing increasing densities. Now the only two ways the Mayor defined it, he talked about under-utilised land can be effectively used more. On some estates, land has been used very wastefully. In terms of Hackney estates, which I know, they are having to face further high rise development. We've blown the blocks down. You are now insisting we put other blocks up, 14 or 15 stories. That I...