• Question by: Trevor Phillips
• Meeting date: 19 September 2001

May I say, Mr Mayor, how much I welcomed your statement yesterday and what you have said today? Some of the Muslim organisations, particularly the Muslim Council of Britain, have been running a hotline for people from the Muslim community to call, and they are now counting dozens of such incidents. I wonder whether, like me, you would care to welcome the statements by the Muslim Council and other Muslim leaders, stressing that the vast majority of British Muslims abhor and condemn the terrorist attacks last week and endorsing the Prime Minister's words which have been published in some of...

• Question by: Louise Bloom
• Meeting date: 19 September 2001

It is rather chicken and egg, isn't it? Handling the abuse of the blue badge system, which is certainly is prevalent, is a different issue from allowing disabled people who live outside London to travel into London. The point is that, apart from fraud, you cannot have a blue badge if you can use public transport. Therefore, anybody who has a blue badge - hopefully, most people have obtained them legitimately - should be exempt from the congestion charge.

• Question by: Louise Bloom
• Meeting date: 19 September 2001

We will hold you to that, because I suspect that, if you held it in some of the outer London boroughs, you would get a very large attendance. Another matter I wanted to raise with you on the consultation on congestion charges relates to the exemption of blue badge holders. Blue badge holders in Greater London will of course be exempt from the congestion charges, but why will not all blue badge holders be exempt? People who live, for example, in Thames Ditton, just the other side of the boundary, who are disabled and who have a blue badge, will...

• Question by: Louise Bloom
• Meeting date: 19 September 2001

Those of us in outer London are very concerned that our boroughs - such as Richmond, Kingston, Waltham Forest and Hillingdon - are going to be turned into one massive park-and-ride area. Eric Ollerenshaw: And Hackney. Louise Bloom: Hackney has had the benefit of the exhibition, as has Lambeth. Why cannot the exhibition come round to the outer London boroughs and give people there the same level of information as has been available to the inner London boroughs?

• Question by: Angie Bray
• Meeting date: 19 September 2001

But you have been warned - not least by the Congestion Charge Scrutiny Panel - that there is bound to be a real problem with the traffic on the boundary road. You have waved that away in the past as something that you do not accept. It is quite clear from what your consultants are telling you and from what everybody else seems to accept as a common-sense notion, that there will be seriously heavy traffic on that boundary road. You have already put in these extra bus lanes down Marylebone Road, which caused problems yet again, as we predicted...

• Question by: Angie Bray
• Meeting date: 19 September 2001

Then let me just test you on this. If you are correct in saying that we cannot expect to see most, if any, of the contents of that report put into practice, nevertheless I think you must accept that what the consultants have done is flag up the problems that the boundary road will not be able to cope with. Therefore, if you are not going to proceed with those ideas, can you tell us now how you are going to deal with the problem of a boundary that simply cannot handle the amount of expected extra traffic - and...

• Question by: Angie Bray
• Meeting date: 19 September 2001

I must say, for ideas that have been so readily discarded, it took the Evening Standard, as I understand it, a considerable time to drag them out of TfL. That suggests to me that there is something there that you did not want the rest of the world to see.

• Question by: Angie Bray
• Meeting date: 19 September 2001

Perhaps we can get back to the congestion charge again. You mentioned in passing the three amazing pages in the Evening Standard, which will have shocked and horrified quite a number of Londoners who read them. They referred, of course, to the so-called "north-west outer package", and looked at the impact of the congestion charge on the boundary road and further afield. In the interests of open government, which I know is a concept to which you are wedded when it suits you, would you now be prepared to publish the other documents which presumably refer to the other parts...

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 19 September 2001

The problem, Mr Mayor, is that, in about a year's time - so we are told; it may change again - you will take responsibility for the Tube. You will be responsible for managing 12,000 or more of the 18,000 staff, which includes all the station staff, all the drivers, and the safety responsibility. Obviously, as you say, you will relate to the infracos, but you do not seem - we have probed this elsewhere, through the Committee system - to have any migration strategy for taking on the Underground, other than a policy which says, "We will try to...

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 19 September 2001

As without doubt the most well meaning and best intentioned Assembly Member there is, I have a couple of questions about the congestion charge. I am sure you will be pleased to hear that the Labour position has - Bob Neill: Changed again. [Laughter.] John Biggs: - is more supportive now of the principle of the congestion charge than it was before, although we remain concerned that there is a range of wicked issues which could potentially derail you in the court of public opinion - rat running, for example, or the effect on people on low incomes. I have...