• Question by: Nicky Gavron
• Meeting date: 18 October 2000

That is a very helpful answer, because there is a lot of progress there. I just want to add a rider. Does the Mayor agree that there is a need for sub-regional planning policies on the Lee valley area to be linked to the planning policies of authorities in the south-east, and that we need to be working across our borders in some parts of London, particularly here, so that the benefits of Stansted, which reaches critical mass as an airport in about two years, for ancillary industries - 15 million passengers a year - can come down the line...

• Question by: Bob Neill
• Meeting date: 18 October 2000

It is our version of the Coulsdon relief road. [Laughter.]

• Question by: Bob Neill
• Meeting date: 18 October 2000

I welcome your commitment to improving rail services and infrastructure in the east of London, and your willingness to meet those of our colleagues outside London on the issue. Would you be prepared, for example, specifically to meet the leaders of both Essex and Kent County Councils and the other associated authorities in the Thames gateway and beyond to consider how best we can promote these proposals? Secondly, will you bear in mind in initiating the proposals you have outlined to Nicky Gavron the fact that the improvement of rail in the Lee valley down to Stratford reinforces the logic...

• Question by: Elizabeth Howlett
• Meeting date: 18 October 2000

Yes, but Mr Kiley may be dissembling. My understanding was that the New York bond issue has raised about £14 billion since 1986, but that is only half the money that has been needed for the New York underground, and New Yorkers had to fund the rest through local taxation hikes. I am glad that you seem to have had some assurance from the Government that there will be stable Government grant - nobody else has had such an assurance. I believe that you and Mr Kiley must have something else up your sleeve, because I would have thought that...

• Question by: Eric Ollerenshaw
• Meeting date: 18 October 2000

I wondered how far you think that the Labour party has an exclusionary agenda, given its inability to take you back into its ranks.

• Question by: Roger Evans
• Meeting date: 18 October 2000

Thank you for your response, Mr Mayor, which did not answer the question. Would you like to have another go?

• Question by: Roger Evans
• Meeting date: 18 October 2000

could you perhaps tell us, as you want to change the statues - and presumably you are not like the Emperor Caligula, who replaced all the heads of statues in Rome with his own to bring them up to date, or Saddam Hussein, who has produced a nice set of murals of himself around Baghdad - what sort of people do you think would be good examples to put on those plinths?

• Question by: Roger Evans
• Meeting date: 18 October 2000

Seeing that we are not going to have the statue of the unknown pigeon, as suggested by your environment adviser - perhaps his only constructive suggestion in this entire debate -

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 18 October 2000

Because it was a private company building a railway.

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 18 October 2000

But our dilemma is that it is not just Gordon Brown against Ken Livingstone: Chancellors since the second world war have tightly controlled public borrowing. They would perceive a bond issue to be public borrowing by their criteria. You have to say how you are going to fund the improvements to the decrepit Underground without the PPP. There is no other show in town. That does not mean that it should not be stopped if it is proved to be unsafe, but you have to answer that question.