• Question by: Elizabeth Howlett
• Meeting date: 11 July 2001

What about the issue between planners and architects on aesthetic values?

• Question by: Elizabeth Howlett
• Meeting date: 11 July 2001

This will be a question but, Lord Rogers, can I quote a poem of John Betjeman to you, only one little line? "Cathedrals will be turned into area cultural centres, lectures on civic duty will be given" - well Brian has tried to give you one - "however, "So don't encourage tourists, stay your hand until we have really got the country planned" So let us put London in there. What I want to ask you is, who do you think Londoners can trust most on aesthetic matters? Poet laureate, a planner or an architect? And I am asking this...

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 11 July 2001

Do you accept that a greater degree of publicity and scrutiny should be available in your case than for any other architects?

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 11 July 2001

Are you happy to publish a register of all of the sites in London where you are?

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 11 July 2001

Just to follow up quickly, I have a feeling that, as much as I admire your work, that maybe you cannot actually do this job as the Mayor's advisor. Is it the case that your firm has been retained to do work at Canary Wharf for example? Were you retained after your appointment by the Mayor as his advisor?

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 11 July 2001

I know that you and I have a common interest in the Thames Gateway area, but it is a specific follow up I think to Meg's question. I believe your partnership may have been tendering for work within the Gateway area and that it may have been commissioned to do work by one of the major landowners within the Thames Gateway area. Now to an unsophisticated Londoner like myself, there is prima facie a problem there, because the Gateway is the key regeneration area in the Mayor's strategy. You are the Mayor's key advisor on regenerational planning in that area...

• Question by: Angie Bray
• Meeting date: 11 July 2001

What happens if the situation arose where there might not be any work you are specifically doing at the time but that there was some in the pipeline?

• Question by: Angie Bray
• Meeting date: 11 July 2001

So you can assure me this morning that there will be no conversations of any sort whatsoever between you and the Mayor concerning areas where the UDP is being considered by the Mayor?

• Question by: Angie Bray
• Meeting date: 11 July 2001

I wonder whether you can understand the concerns that I have expressed in the past about the role you play in advising the Mayor and also the fact that the Mayor will at some stage look at every UDP that has to go before his office. I am thinking in particular of Westminster's which came back from the Mayor's office with remarks written all over the place about the fact that he could not find their UDP acceptable unless they were going to go forward with very tall buildings in the Paddington area, and of course your name crops up...

• Question by: Tony Arbour
• Meeting date: 11 July 2001

Well if it should not be you as an individual who is in a position to say that, is it right that one man should be able to impose his views on the rest of us?