• Question by: Roger Evans
• Meeting date: 17 October 2001

Jenny has convinced me it is a good idea, anyway - if we were in any doubt. At a recent knockabout session, otherwise known as Mayor's Question Time, you made the commitment that, in its waste disposal, Sutton Council was "setting a high standard, which I would like the rest of London to achieve". Graham Tope: It still is. Roger Evans: When you said that, was it your aspiration - I think that is the word you used - that Londoners should have to wait two weeks to have their rubbish collected while it rotted outside? Was it your aspiration...

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 17 October 2001

If the PPP goes ahead, I and my successors will be bound to contracts for 30 years. What is depressing is that, even where those contracts say that a certain line will be modernised at a particular time, they are not legally binding on the infracos. So it would be very dangerous for me or anybody else as Mayor to start saying, "We are going to do this, that or the other thing on the Tube," because legally we most probably will not have the power. If we want to add anything to the infraco contracts, we have to pay...

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 17 October 2001

There are quite a few things about buses where we could read out a shopping list of things you have offered us as Londoners, and they may not all happen. The Mayor: You are coming back to the subject of conductors, aren't you? John Biggs: I am certainly thinking of conductors, because I think it is worth Londoners knowing that, in the draft budget for TfL, next year we are being asked to cough up £17 million for conductors, when the bus industry more or less universally believes that they do not have any value on buses that were not...

• Question by: Jennette Arnold OBE
• Meeting date: 17 October 2001

Thank you for that answer. Will you look to putting this subject on your campaigning programme? I remind you that one in seven Londoners could be affected, and I would have thought that it was an area where you could look to using your position and leadership role across London. That is what I would like you to think about doing.

• Question by: Graham Tope
• Meeting date: 17 October 2001

I very much welcome what you have said, and your commitment this morning. What is your team doing to talk to GLA staff who are lesbian or gay about what improvements can be made to turn into reality the statements we have all made about the GLA board a model employer?

• Question by: Darren Johnson
• Meeting date: 17 October 2001

It is very welcome that you are prepared to use your leverage and press for change in the pension entitlements. Another area on which you gave a previous commitment was GLA contracts, and ensuring that companies with which the GLA and the functional bodies do business take a pro-equalities approach. What progress has been made on that, and as part of that equalities approach to contracts, could provision be made for recognition of the Partnership Register?

• Question by: Angie Bray
• Meeting date: 17 October 2001

On the first instance, about the question of refuse, that is precisely why we are planning to use the carrot, and why John Duffy has conducted the experiment in Lambeth under which people get a cashback on their council tax for separating their rubbish. So we will try the carrot. Then we will come round and beat them with the stick if they don't. [Laughter.] As for planning, we have been able to get agreement with all developers on affordable housing. Where we will go to inquiry is on the erosion of the green belt. I cannot remember them all...

• Question by: Tony Arbour
• Meeting date: 17 October 2001

That is rather disingenuous of you, to say that this is going to be providing housing for key workers in the way you have listed. So far as I can tell - and I look at all your comments on applications that come in - you merely say that you do not like the amount of affordable housing they have provided because they have not provided up to the figure you have set. You are right: almost invariably, they come back and say they will increase the amount of affordable housing. But that is precisely the use of the stick...

• Question by: Andrew Pelling
• Meeting date: 17 October 2001

Yes, we learn from our own experience here, don't we? You also emphasised the importance of politics in the real world, in the sense that party policy requires extensive use of disincentives to impact the way in which people behave. Can I turn to one specific problem here in London? That is the problem which has been revealed today of this cut in support for London Underground. Will that not hamper your ability to invest in transport so as to provide the carrot for people not to drive into town? Are you not going to have to think about delaying...

• Question by: Angie Bray
• Meeting date: 17 October 2001

Mr Livingstone, the most obvious example in most people's minds at the moment where you are using stick rather than carrot is over the congestion charge. You are precisely hoping to force people out of their cars by use of taxation, yet you are admitting that most of your public transport improvements will not be there; so they will simply have to pay the tax without enjoying any improvements on public transport. In answer to Andrew, you admitted that the disastrous cut in funding to the London Underground will put back improvements there somewhat. You talk about improvements on the...