• Question by: Richard Barnes
• Meeting date: 20 December 2000

Thank you; and as a wily politician I congratulate you on avoiding the question. The question relates to the £60 million which you, at your press conference, earmarked for police officers in London. However, the question stands in its own right, and my supplementary is this. You have mentioned several times the diversion of taxation and funds from London to elsewhere in the country. If the Metropolitan Police had been funded at the same levels as it was four or five years ago, its central Government funding would be about £220 million a year higher than it is now. You...

• Question by: Bob Neill
• Meeting date: 20 December 2000

Does not your last point raise again the spectre of the old and deplorable GLC overspill estates, which caused enormous social problems in many of the outer London boroughs? Is that not in truth an exceedingly old-fashioned and reactionary way of addressing London's housing problems? Should you not instead be looking at much more imaginative means of encouraging low-cost and assisted purchase, which would reflect the evidence that the vast majority of workers - even those who suffer from the comparatively high costs in London - would wish to buy rather than rent if there was a means to do...

• Question by: Andrew Pelling
• Meeting date: 20 December 2000

I was rather concerned about one of the points you made at the press conference on this issue. You said that you could remember your days in Lambeth, when there were no gardens, and that you did not see the point of having gardens in Lambeth. Is there a danger that your willingness to concede higher density might see a return to a 1960s-style high-rise flat approach to housing in London?

• Question by: Andrew Pelling
• Meeting date: 20 December 2000

Thank you for that full answer. What would your response be to those people who decry the general principle of a 50% approach, and who say that it might actually deliver less affordable housing rather than more?

• Question by: Bob Neill
• Meeting date: 20 December 2000

That is not affordable housing

• Question by: Sally Hamwee
• Meeting date: 20 December 2000

Ken, do you agree that the two prime objectives of housing policy should be to ensure that there is a decent home available for every Londoner, and that we need to keep London functioning, which it cannot do unless housing is available; and that, in order to reach that point, it is necessary to have robust research work, which may in itself be part of a piece of negotiation with developers, who are naturally, at this early stage, trying to cling on to the value of land?

• Question by: Samantha Heath
• Meeting date: 20 December 2000

When are we going to see the schedule of improvements in terms of the new routes you are talking about? You talk about orbital routes: even in your transport strategy, you do not indicate where we are going to see the improvements to take up the slack that we are hoping to achieve with congestion charging. I am talking about a targeted schedule of improvements - not the current contracts, but what you intend to put in place before congestion charging is introduced.

• Question by: Samantha Heath
• Meeting date: 20 December 2000

I am glad that you think that you have tried to give us some detailed response. I have to pay you the inverted compliment that I think that you have responded as I would expect the poorer level of Minister to do. I am so sad that you fell into the fold so quite quickly. Your responses, quite honestly, are not detailed enough. You have had responsibility for buses, for example, for quite few months now. I have not personally seen any improvement on the buses that I take every day. When are we going to see a detailed schedule...

• Question by: Toby Harris
• Meeting date: 20 December 2000

Since I was named, can I explain about these fascinating secret discussions, which the Mayor now wants to hold in public? The Chair: If you would do so briefly, Toby. Toby Harris: There was an initial discussion, which was to give me some idea of the extent to which the Mayor was prepared to make extra money available to inform the MPA's budget discussions. In the course of that, the Mayor indicated the sort of figure he was talking about, and the sort of things he was interested in - many of which accorded with what I suspected would be...

• Question by: Graham Tope
• Meeting date: 20 December 2000

Are you aware, Ken, of the anger that your announcement of the MPA budget caused to MPA members, and particularly to the non-Assembly members, who are perhaps less prepared for these things than some of us who have been in politics for a long time? They felt very undermined that, on the day before they were to have a budget workshop to consider options, you effectively closed down all the options by making your announcement. That is not the way to work with a police authority. They felt very undermined by it; they still do. The debate on the budget...