• 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...

• Question by: Roger Evans
• Meeting date: 19 September 2001

Given that you have admitted that congestion charge will not improve air quality in London, where it is 100% land traffic, how is it going to improve air quality at Heathrow, where it is only 60%?

• Question by: Roger Evans
• Meeting date: 19 September 2001

You see, I think that the voters may be confused by something you say. You tell our Green colleagues that most of the pollution around Heathrow is caused by aircraft, yet you suggest that congestion charge is the solution to this.

• Question by: Roger Evans
• Meeting date: 19 September 2001

When you take your roadshow to the residents of Surbiton, will you also consult them over your proposals to put a congestion charge around Heathrow, which will affect them pretty directly?

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

That is part of my point - that we are not talking about a huge number of people here. I am slightly concerned that we seem to be punishing people who legitimately have blue badges for the sake of those who do not.

• Question by: Jenny Jones
• Meeting date: 19 September 2001

I do not take taxis very often, but I have friends who do, and they tell me that taxi drivers seem to have a very distorted idea of exactly what congestion charging will mean. I wonder whether you could put something out for taxi drivers, which they could keep in their cabs, so that, when they start talking about the proposals, they can refer to what is actually going to happen, rather than what they have made up on the hoof.

• Question by: Sally Hamwee
• Meeting date: 19 September 2001

Jennette Arnold: And we will have access to it, will we? The Chair: Ken, can I come back to those who currently need to commute into central London, and who will at the lowest feel that the charge for those coming from outer London is controversial. In your work on the spatial development strategy, will you take into account views about the need for employment in outer London, and integrate the two strategies, so that you are looking at increasing employment in the suburbs and in outer London town centres?

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

Yes, but I have correspondence which shows that that is clearly not the case. The problem is that Bob Kiley and his team are obsessed with collecting information which is purely around the PPP issue, and they are not looking at the operational issues of how you manage 12,000 staff; how you make sure the stations are open; how you make sure the trains turn up on time. They just ain't doing it.

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

Any self-respecting organisation that was taking on a new responsibility would have a transition team; it would have budgets; it would respond in detail to the project plans of the Underground; it would be telling Londoners what it aspired to do. I appreciate that there is a twin track here: you have a perfectly respectable political strategy of trying to defeat it - The Mayor: No, it is not twin-track - John Biggs: It looks as though you have failed in that so far. You may have a last gasp, but what will happen when the PPP -