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• Question by: Angie Bray
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

I appreciate that the widely used definition of the poverty line is 60% of the median income. How was that originally arrived at, and is that an absolutely fixed definition?

• Question by: Angie Bray
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

No, no, indeed, because I think that is an important point, because I think that in the mindset of the public it is confusing when you hear that x percent of people in London are technically living at or below the poverty line. I wondered if that definition would still be applicable if the median income rose considerably in London. One might feel that the definition was less, then, to do with poverty. I suppose I am asking you: are we talking about relative poverty as opposed to absolute poverty?

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

I think this is a fantastically important matter, and I suppose the problem I have with Dee Doocey's question is that it's very easy to try to put a number on this and say that £4 billion will solve the problem. I think we all know that out there there's a scepticism in the wider public that we are spending more on public services. I'd like more to be spent on my constituency in East London. People are asking whether we are getting sufficient value out of it, whether our services are sufficiently functional and so on, so clearly, there...

• Question by: Angie Bray
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

One of the things that you have not really talked about in your answers is that while we bandy around this expression, `learning and skills', nobody actually defines precisely what skills are actually going to do the trick, and help deliver some of the solutions. Am I right in thinking that one of the skills that we need to put much more focus on, if we are going to get more people into work and skilled up, is language in this city of ours. The question - really for Mr Faulkner - is whether he finds that languages do provide...

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

I would like to take a slightly less negative approach than the UK Independence Party (UKIP) on this issue. The ability of EU funds to transform other areas of Europe where there is experience of poverty has been quite significant, and, given that there are areas of considerable poverty within London, and you may not be able to answer this, but can you think of examples of good practice elsewhere and has, for example, the Child Poverty Action Group, looked at examples of good practice in other European states which could be echoed and mirrored and copied and stolen to...

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 18 January 2006

Sally Hamwee (Chair): I explained when I wrote to you ' I think it was before Christmas ' that we would ask about the financial details because it is a very particular, very unusual position that you are in, very much one of public interest. John Biggs (AM): The question was to ask you for a list of the contractual benefits to which you are entitled up to 31 January. Could you tell us how many crates of claret, how many rooms at the Savoy, how many transatlantic flights, how many gold-plated telephones you get as part of your contract?

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 18 January 2006

I was a little uneasy about this question, but I was allocated a lead role on it. Perhaps some of my less pleasant colleagues would like to follow it through. It seems to me that we have a perfect right under the Access to Information legislation to ask formal questions of TfL and the Mayor to which we get formal answers. I suppose underlying this is a concern that down the years that TfL has not been the most transparent organisation in the world. I guess that the contract of its Chief Executive could be seen as the apex of...

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 18 January 2006

I do not want to rake over answers you have given already, but at the last Mayor's Question Time, the Mayor described that it was asserted ' I think it was an Evening Standard story ' that there had been a bust-up between you and him about the fate or future or proposals of Jay Walder (Managing Director, Finance and Planning, TfL). He described that as being rubbish and piffle. Would you use similar words to describe that or was the Mayor being less than open with us on that matter?

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 18 January 2006

Is there a fundamental disagreement between yourself and Mr Walder on an aspect of strategy which was instrumental in your decision to hang up your boots?

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 18 January 2006

I have one other question about your management style. Perhaps you can put the record straight on this, because the press can be very wounding. There have been allegations on the one hand that you are a dreadful control freak and that nothing has happened in TfL without you blocking it or running it over your desk; on the other hand, there have been various scurrilous allegations that in fact you have been almost negligent in your role and are barely in the office, that you have a cardboard cut-out there, for example, and nothing really happens. Can you clarify...