• Question by: Roger Evans
• Meeting date: 16 October 2002

Can you use your directive power as Chair of TfL to ensure that your two audits of Safety Management Across the Group are discussed? The one on group issues found that safety was poorly controlled throughout TfL, across the group, and the one on safety management suggested this area needed improving and there was a lack of consistent health and safety policy across TfL. Could you then come back to this Assembly and let us know what's being done about this? I am sure that you are as unhappy as the rest of the people in the GLA will be...

• Question by: Roger Evans
• Meeting date: 16 October 2002

We all look forward to receiving your re-election newsletter in November which, I understand from your delegated authorities, is going to cost over £200,000 to print and deliver throughout London. Moving back to the safety issue, we had a useful discussion about your managed decline of safety standards on London buses at the last Mayor's Question Time, where you stated to us that, "Safety is discussed at every TfL board meeting" to quote your own words. What are the safety issues that are going to be discussed at the next TfL board meeting?

• Question by: Sally Hamwee
• Meeting date: 16 October 2002

It's the co-ordination of the issues.

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

I appreciate that. The point, though, is this: on a sensitive local issue of conflicting priorities, why do you think that the local council, which is closer to the issue and knows the community and the site much better than you could - simply because of the other pressures you face - is not best placed to make the decision?

• Question by: Richard Barnes
• Meeting date: 27 February 2002

Over the coming months and years, no doubt every constituency Member will have a vested interest in the issue of schools on green belt. My borough of Hillingdon - this is referred to in your "Planning First" letter notices - has a planning application for a school. Under my leadership, we opened up some 500 acres of land as green belt at Waterside and at Stockley Park, but we are now under pressure to build a school because we are bussing kids away from Ruislip to schools on the fringes, adjacent to Harrow and Ealing, which take about 50% of...

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

I just wanted to say that this not about a project on the cheap: this is the only site that is available, as I think your officers have now accepted. There is always an argument to be had about what is local and what is strategic. We do not at the moment have a strategic policy on open spaces. The Green Spaces Scrutiny Committee asked for that: we need a strategic framework. It is not very long ago that you were willing to signal that the South Bank Centre could build on Jubilee Gardens. If you are going to make...

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

There are always two sides to every story. Green space is immensely important for inner-London communities, but the pressure facing Southwark and this community is that at least 40 or 50 kids are not in school at the moment, and enormous numbers of other children are travelling great distances to school - and as you say, there are more on the way in to the system. This is not about a cheap site. From Southwark's perspective, this is the only site that is both available and suitable. The park itself, as you know, will be sports fields, tennis courts and...

• Question by: Jenny Jones
• Meeting date: 27 February 2002

But you made the point that it is not just a question of having the green space: it is also a question of looking after it and making it an attractive space for people to use, so that there is no threat to it in the future, with people saying that it is just a piece of derelict ground. Are there any measures by which you could encourage councils to keep these areas in good repair?

• Question by: Roger Evans
• Meeting date: 27 February 2002

Your decision on the site at Southwark, I think, was informed by the green spaces report by the Assembly, which Val Shawcross, the Member for the area, has mentioned. The cross-party report, signed by all members of the Committee, stated: "We deplore the purposeful neglect of green space in order to increase the chance of its development. We are also aware that unintentionally" - I am not sure that that word applies in this case - "local authorities might follow the same route, and in those cases we should presume against granting development in such circumstances." Did Southwark council or...

• Question by: Jenny Jones
• Meeting date: 27 February 2002

I want to thank you for directing refusal on Paterson Park. Southwark council is under a lot of pressure to do things cheaply, and it was a complete mistake. Also, you are going to be under huge pressure to accept some of these new developments in London. Developers are now choosing to put housing into these school packages: because the schools are so easy to argue for, they are slipping in housing on the back of them. Is that something that you can resist?