• Question by: Len Duvall OBE
• Meeting date: 04 April 2001

Thank you for supplying those papers, which took so long. I think that we now need to understand why it took so long. Perhaps you can clarify the issue. Was it you or Lord Rogers who wanted to expand the role but was curbed by officers on grounds of propriety and potential conflicts of interest? Who was it? Was it you or Lord Rogers?

• Question by: Len Duvall OBE
• Meeting date: 04 April 2001

But what would you make of it if you were in my position?

• Question by: Sally Hamwee
• Meeting date: 04 April 2001

To pursue Len's point about the detail of the contract, speaking as a lawyer - [laughter] - could I put it to you that, particularly in public life, what matters is the spirit, and being seen to be entirely proper; and that, if we have to resort to analysing the words in a contract, we have not lived up to the propriety we should seek to attain?

• Question by: Len Duvall OBE
• Meeting date: 04 April 2001

I understand, Mayor, that you have signed off the business plan Along with your advisers, and I was surprised to see on page 14 of a 38-page document - despite what you and officers have said publicly, that Lord Rogers would not be involved in any planning decisions - a reference to "advice on eye-level market planning and major development opportunities". What are Assembly Members to make of that, in light of your previous statements and what we have been told in the document we have been given?

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 04 April 2001

In the event of an agreement being reached" - that is what it says.

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 04 April 2001

The Hutton report: again selective in use of the facts. There is no commitment to being honest with Londoners about this, The National Audit Office: you came close to being honest on that one, I give you that. But with the Kiley and Prescott agreement, which is in your Mayor's report today, you say that you had a commitment from the Deputy Prime Minister to unified management. There was no such commitment. It is a Livingstonite soundbite, and it has limited meaning to anything but a select group of Londoners.

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 04 April 2001

What I find interesting in your reply is that it is light on the facts. As I understand it - this can be substantiated - the facts are that the maintenance costs on the London Underground are lower, although the service has similar levels of availability to that in New York; that the failure rates of the stock in New York are slightly higher than in London; that the percentage of trains running on time in London is on average about 94% - which I agree is unacceptable, but in New York it is about 92%; that the productivity of...

• Question by: Samantha Heath
• Meeting date: 04 April 2001

The other thing that came to my attention was on the Appointments Committee. Your Equality Unit is being set up, and a member made a comment that there should certainly be disabled representation. I felt that that was marginalising the issue. The briefing that I have says that Churchill and Friend have set up a list of recommendations, one of which is to ensure that all staff know of sources and availability of alternative forms of communication. I have not been advised how, if a blind person writes to me and I need to respond quickly, I am supposed to...

• Question by: Sally Hamwee
• Meeting date: 04 April 2001

Do you think that another lesson from this might be that part of the budget for what was obviously an expensive campaign in consulting on the transport strategy - and some might say was a showy one - could better be spent on working out how to reach the hard-to-reach groups; and that we need to put effort into ensuring that consultation does involve those that we all want to involve?

• Question by: Samantha Heath
• Meeting date: 04 April 2001

: I was disturbed to learn that, since the transport strategy was released, there have been other problems about People's question Time or advertising of posts on the GLA. For People's Question Time, people asked for information to be sent to them by email rather than by post, because they can collect it more easily if they are partially sighted. Why can we not send out information by email, and what other methods are we using to contact people, in addition to the traditional post?