• Question by: Trevor Phillips
• Meeting date: 29 June 2000

On this question of your relationship with this Assembly. You have got a Cabinet, it is not full of experts. It is full of people whose opinions you want to hear, which is fair enough. You have talked about the Civic Forum, you have now got the McDonnell exercise. Now I understand that this is what I hear is called "big tent politics" and you want to reach out but the law which sets up this Authority is very clear. This Assembly has a specific role, it is your principal scrutineer, it is the principal instrument of public accountability for...

• Question by: Andrew Pelling
• Meeting date: 29 June 2000

I would very much just like to seek clarification on something you said earlier about advisers being on a 4 year fixed term. Now I appreciate that we are all here on a 4 year fixed term but can I clarify is that absolutely the case? If we had reason to dismiss them, we would be obliged to pay them for a 4 year contract.

• Question by: Bob Neill
• Meeting date: 29 June 2000

Following on from that, my concern was not that you shall be constrained in what you do but there should be total identifiability so that we can decide ultimately is there proper value for money, and you are happy to support that.

• Question by: Bob Neill
• Meeting date: 29 June 2000

I agree with you about the deficiencies of the Act and I think a lot of members would, from all sides of the spectrum. It is a woefully drafted Act and doesn't say much to the people responsible for putting it through. But I am also going to say that when the papers went out for the first Advisory Cabinet Meeting, there was reference to members of the Cabinet being given full support for their roles. Is that, in other words, what you have told us now as you envisage is that full support, as in the answer to Trevor...

• Question by: Bob Neill
• Meeting date: 29 June 2000

This touches upon the point that the Chair was making. What I am interested to know is this: you have got a Cabinet which at the moment is at 23 members and may get bigger and that is the same size as the Assembly itself. The Act rather specifically restricted the number of personal appointments that were open to the Mayor. All the other staff appointments are the responsibility of this body, the Assembly, on behalf of the Authority. There is inevitably a public cost implication in your having a Cabinet in this form, which is an unusual one and...

• Question by: Trevor Phillips
• Meeting date: 29 June 2000

Can you just deal with the other points that I raised which is the likely call on the Authority staff, office space and other functions. Here, I am particularly interested in what the call that you expect the Cabinet members and advisers - such as Lord Rogers, who have been named publicly - are likely to make on the Authority's resources because as we know the Authority's resources are not unlimited. As a consequence, we may need the Assembly to take a view on whether we want those resources released to them

• Question by: Trevor Phillips
• Meeting date: 29 June 2000

Can you just clarify one thing? You said a moment ago that Lee Jasper was not yet a GLA employee. You have just said that he is

• Question by: Brian Coleman
• Meeting date: 29 June 2000

And yet we are ham-strung with the fixed vision of this building so whatever changes we want to make on the structure and the way the Assembly and the Mayor's office work, we are stuck with an inflexible building.

• Question by: Brian Coleman
• Meeting date: 29 June 2000

But Chairman the Mayor made the point earlier that this body is going to change its way of working probably over the next 12 months

• Question by: Brian Coleman
• Meeting date: 29 June 2000

The Mayor has asked for cheaper solutions. Well, I have informed the good folk of Barnett and Camden that I could run the Assembly out of my spare bedroom. My spare bedroom is still available. But the serious point is, Chairman, the overrun on the Scottish Parliamentary building and the debacle of the Cardiff Bay development for the Welsh Assembly has brought those two bodies into public disrepute. Is the Mayor worried that for whatever reason there are delays or overspends or whatever, whoever picks up the bill, it will bring this Assembly into disrepute because all these projects seem...