• Question by: Richard Barnes
• Meeting date: 27 July 2000

The Metropolitan Police are already labouring under a 2% efficiency target year on year. There are only so many years when you can actually make an additional efficiency saving. Your 3% is 1% above that. The Metropolitan Police are also suffering from reduced budgets year on year and a reduced share of the national cake of police funding. Is it your intention to squeeze the Police until the pips squeak, or the ratepayers of London, bearing in mind a 17% increase in Police precept this year?

• Question by: Valerie Shawcross
• Meeting date: 27 July 2000

I will have second on this one and then I will take a written reply to my last question, if I may as a trade. I was trying to reconcile the budget papers between the cabinet and the budget papers that went to the Budget Committee and there was a dog that didn't bark in one of them. In the budget paper that went to the cabinet, there was no reference, I notice, to I think £3.5 million which ought to be put away every year in order to save for the elections in 2004. Whereas in the Budget Committee...

• Question by: Valerie Shawcross
• Meeting date: 27 July 2000

But I hope you would agree that everybody would expect the GLA to be efficient and not to be wasteful. In light of that, will the consultant that I know you are bringing in to review the budgets of the functional bodies to help progress the process of finding efficiencies, also be looking at the core budget of the GLA itself? There are quite major increases in the GLA's budget being proposed next year and we ought to have a determined striving for efficiency right across the family of the GLA, including the core administration?

• Question by: Elizabeth Howlett
• Meeting date: 27 July 2000

Mr Mayor in a report to the Budget Committee there was a forecast underspend of £4 million for this year because the full staffing compliment is not in place. But you have asked for additional funding of £3.5 million. Now if the staff are all in place for 2001/2002, will we be in deficit because you will carry forward will you a £3.5 million additional spend and perhaps even more next year?

• Question by: Darren Johnson
• Meeting date: 27 July 2000

Having heard Elizabeth Howlett's views on incineration, have you more faith in the Conservative front bench spokesman, Archie Norman's opposition to incineration and commitment to the Tories moratorium on incineration and the whole energy from waste project?

• Question by: Elizabeth Howlett
• Meeting date: 27 July 2000

Mr Mayor you will have to get on pretty fast with your strategy because landfill contracts, a lot of them, are ending in 2002. So waste authorities at the moment are having to go out to tender and I can assure you that the central ones are going out on short-term and long-term contracts and asking how they are going to comply with present Government's initiatives and strategies on waste disposal. Incineration, of course, is moving on very fast and new incinerators can in fact give energy. They could light streets, they can light housing estates. So I don't think...

• Question by: Samantha Heath
• Meeting date: 27 July 2000

In addition to that, will you lobby Central Government to make sure that Londoners get their fair share of money so that boroughs can actually invest in recycling. They can invest in the market for recycling and they can also ensure that most importantly, we actually do something about reducing waste.

• Question by: Samantha Heath
• Meeting date: 27 July 2000

Of course Londoners need to know that your waste strategy is actually worth the paper it is written on, even if it is recycled. Can you ensure that no incinerators will get planning permission before boroughs have met their target of 25% recycling by 2005?

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 27 July 2000

Not wishing to prolong things, but I must say I am very disappointed with your reply and I would invite you to come and meet dentists in East London. The evidence in Birmingham, in the West Midlands for example, is that where fluoridation was introduced the incidence of dental cavities in kids declined enormously, particularly kids in poorer families who quite often don't have the benefit of the expensive and well chosen diets of the more middle class families. I think it would be a disservice to the people of London to rule out fluoridation at this stage. The evidence...

• Question by: Darren Johnson
• Meeting date: 27 July 2000

I will. I think this is fighting an old battle. The huge level of cavities that kids used to get in their teeth are now not the problem. I mean there has been fluoride in toothpaste and kids swallow a lot of it. And whereas I know there are many areas of the world where fluoride levels in water are below those that would be the case if we added it, those are areas of the world where, over millions of years, the local wildlife has evolved to cope with that level of fluoride. It doesn't automatically follow that merely...