• 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.

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

I suspect you didn't visit the site, and this shows here because in fact there is no trade off on this site, it is in fact a second stadium. The original stadium remains in effect and they are going to have two pitches, so there is no trade off. This is really annoying residents and they would be quite happy, as I would have been, with a development that stayed on the imprint, or even a bit larger than the imprint, of the existing stadium. But what we have here is 15 acres of Green Belt and Barnet Cricket Club...

• Question by: Bob Neill
• Meeting date: 27 March 2002

The second point I wanted to raise develops John's point and is this: you made the point on a number of occasions that London is the lowest density city in Europe. Are you aware that one has to be very careful about comparing like with like and that many of the cities in Europe have city boundaries which exclude the bulk of the kind of low-density suburbs which are within Greater London. Does that not flag up the need to be careful in that comparison and using that as an excuse to push up densities in the suburbs needlessly? There...

• Question by: Angie Bray
• Meeting date: 16 October 2002

I think we can see that what we've got here today is a real problem, not with the fact that we're getting some new transport services but the actual consultation that precedes them. Clearly, there is something that's going wrong which is why we've got so many petitions, and so many petitioners here today. I hope that you do recognise that there is a message coming out loud and clear this morning, that TfL has got real problems with the way it relates to local residents when it is consulting on new schemes. There is a group of residents from...

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

Mr Mayor, this is a common problem; it's a local residential problem; it's a problem that people who envisage that they have a problem, have in trying to get people like yourself to do something about it. This issue has been going on for more than two years because my colleague, Samantha Heath, myself and lots of residents had a public meeting to which Dave Wetzel and the proprietors of G1 bus attended. Nothing has been done. The bus that is now put in down this narrow residential road is too large and an even larger bus is envisaged. All...

• Question by: Richard Barnes
• Meeting date: 16 October 2002

Mr Mayor, I welcome your proposals about the way in which you deal with the petitions in future and I will take that to the Standing Orders Committee when we meet, I believe it is later this week. What I presented to you today is a petition of over 11,000 people, and only 2,593 people responded in Ealing to the consultation that TfL conducted. This is proper consultation with people; we've actually gone out and talked to people through the residents' associations. We haven't distributed 300,000 leaflets and, indeed, I don't know where the 300,000 leaflets went to in Ealing...