• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 16 January 2002

I'm taking that as no. Let's look at the congestion charging package. Now regardless of whether it goes ahead, it does require you to procure something like £60 or £70 million worth of work from private contractors. Did you sit down and look through the options of how you should procure that? The way your budget is structured, it's just a straight hit on the taxpayers. It's an obvious scheme where you could have leased it; you could have structured it through a private procurement, which would have been funded from the revenues it generated. Did you look at that...

• Question by: Trevor Phillips
• Meeting date: 16 January 2002

That's helpful to know but you still haven't quite answered why there's £11 million coming off the precept which seems to me a quite arbitrary choice. The total capital requirement in the TfL budget is about £310 million. What you're deciding is that, with the £55 million in TfL, you're going to take it all off grant and precept income. What I can't quite understand is, given the uncertainties that you yourself talked about at Budget Committee, how far should congestion charging go? What would you have to do to absorb London Underground? Why TfL alone, amongst any organisation that...

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 16 January 2002

But the increase in grant is over 40% and that's the increase in the net money you get before you go to council taxpayers - over 40%. In what way can you describe an increase of 40% as leading to a position where this year's budget starts as being under-funded? There's a structural increase in the bus subsidies required to provide services. There's roughly £250 million, which is expansion in services. Now that's my assessment but you're saying it's under-funded. Can you explain to us why it is so chronically under-funded that you need another £100 million from London taxpayers?

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 16 January 2002

Can you explain to Londoners how it is that an authority - Transport for London - which is seeing an increase in its government grant from £700 million to roughly £1 billion this year, can be described in any shape or form as being under-funded?

• Question by: Trevor Phillips
• Meeting date: 16 January 2002

So, Bob's saying that this is his figure for the programme he set in 1982 to 2000? He made a mistake. He failed.

• Question by: Trevor Phillips
• Meeting date: 16 January 2002

So we can expect precept demands of this order in your own election year? Let me just ask you one other question. Let me just ask you about the advice that you're getting because I'm still puzzled about this prejudice you have against borrowing. I had a look today on the website of the nearest equivalent, the Metropolitan Transport Authority of New York, and their capital programme is funded by a combination of grant and borrowing. In fact, the amount that they borrow, about $1 billion, is about the same as they receive in grant. Their total budget is $6.9...

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 16 January 2002

When we look again at the question of borrowings and private funded schemes within public transport, which even the most left wing administrations in this country pursue these days, can you explain to us why you have vetoed what's called the LUPP, the London Underground Property Partnership scheme, which would generate hundreds of millions to help fund deficits in the Underground?

• Question by: Valerie Shawcross
• Meeting date: 16 January 2002

I'm glad to hear you're converted on the topic of PFIs. My last question is with regard to this £76 million investment in a congestion charging fee this coming year. What happens if you are subjected, say, to a judicial review from an agreed borough and that expenditure gets delayed? What happens if you decide after the consultation that you would be better advised to spend a longer time planning the congestion charging programme? What will you spend that £76 million on? Do you have alternative public transport improvement capacity projects on the stocks that you can go for?

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 16 January 2002

We've had a lengthy debate earlier about the Underground and the potential effect that will have on TfL's budget, and I happen to accept your view that it would be fairly crazy for us to squirrel away money to simply save the Government having to make hard decisions about how it endows the Underground when it transfers to us. Having said that, the massive deficit in your budget in its structuring is that it says nothing about how you are going to manage the Underground, about what proposals you have. You're putting massive additional subsidies into buses. You're saying nothing...

• Question by: Valerie Shawcross
• Meeting date: 16 January 2002

But there are some aspects of the implementation of the congestion charging scheme, which would not have been desirable other than that they fit in with congestion charging, for example the scheme at Box Hill Cross involves the widening of the road. Unless the congestion charging project had been on the cards, that clearly would not have been the case. Going back to this issue of debt in borrowing, while I understand your shyness about entering into hire purchase agreements, do you not think there's a special argument in favour of using debt borrowing and PFI for investment, where it...