• Question by: Graham Tope
• Meeting date: 27 March 2002

I think your original reply referred to the Green Belt. Will you confirm to us that you will oppose any suggestions of expansion into the Green Belt around London?

• Question by: Mike Tuffrey
• Meeting date: 27 March 2002

Will he give us his undertaking that he will instruct the LDA to put actual numbers on their papers headed `Performance Targets' to give effect to precisely what he has been saying?

• Question by: Mike Tuffrey
• Meeting date: 27 March 2002

If we've got this level of growth in schools, never mind houses and everything else, where are they going to go? Brownfield sites obviously, because nobody wants to build on green space, so I had a look in the LDA strategy- one of my little cures for insomnia since I arrived here is reading all these great strategies. I finally tracked a reference down in the LDA Corporate Plan where the figure is 30 hectares of brownfield land reclaimed per year. Now I don't think you need a degree in maths or geography to know that, if the population growth...

• Question by: Mike Tuffrey
• Meeting date: 27 March 2002

We want colour but particularly we want questions answered which is what this morning is about. I still hope that we are all here to ask questions from this side and have straight answers from that side. We see this population growth and these projections, from the Liberal Democrat perspective, as an opportunity. We must seize the opportunity of the growth and the economic development and the drivers behind it and the wealth created, to redress some of London's historic imbalances and injustices. One issue is, for example, the poor state of schooling in many inner city areas. Can I...

• Question by: Darren Johnson
• Meeting date: 27 March 2002

Do we not have any responsibilities to the rest of the country? You are constantly championing this world city role and trying to grab more and more growth for London. Have we not got responsibilities to make the case for strong regional economies throughout the whole of the country and to make the case for regional government that can build effective regional strategies around the whole of the country and not just London grabbing more and more and more of the action?

• Question by: Darren Johnson
• Meeting date: 27 March 2002

You say that the population growth is sustainable for London, but is it sustainable for the country as a whole? Does it make sense to have more and more pressure, more and more growth in London whilst other regions have declining populations? Is that sustainable for the country as a whole?

• Question by: Valerie Shawcross
• Meeting date: 27 March 2002

Thank you, that's a very welcome step forward. It's certainly the case that most of the boroughs I have contact with in south London have pupils out of school at the moment, so I think there is much scope for cross-borough working on this. If I can raise two quick points with you then. I think one is that, as the Green Spaces Report suggested, there does need to be a hierarchy of priorities put into place in terms of decision making in planning. When opportunities arise, questions ought to be asked about whether this is a suitable school site...

• Question by: Brian Coleman
• Meeting date: 27 March 2002

Don't you think you are being a bit hypocritical regarding the Green Belt bearing in mind last week you gave permission against vast opposition for 15 acres of the Green Belt in Barnet to take a 10,000 seat stadium for Barnet Football Club, a club which regularly attracts a crowd of 1200. You know this really does undermine, does it not, everything else you say on the Green Belt when you allow an application such as that?

• Question by: Darren Johnson
• Meeting date: 27 March 2002

Can you make that case more clear? We don't often hear that sort of balanced approach when you are talking about this to the media, so often you come over as a London version of the SNP or something like that. I think we do need to put the case for regional government across the whole of the country and we do need to make the case that we can't continue in London to have more and more pressure and more and more growth. There are natural limits to that and we need to make the case clear that regional...

• Question by: Brian Coleman
• Meeting date: 27 March 2002

A pitch is one thing, no one's going to object to a football pitch in the Green Belt. What you've got is a 10,000 seat concrete stadium, which is something else.