Search questions

• Question by: Murad Qureshi
• Meeting date: 24 October 2007

Can I just go back to Neale's comments. I am glad to hear that local authorities are looking at areas where there is already the social infrastructure to provide additional housing. It strikes me, though, that the last time the capacity study was done at the GLA, during the first term, the local authorities in the south-west, where there is the infrastructure, the roads and what have you, got off lightly. I am talking about Richmond upon Thames and Kingston upon Thames. It seems to me, when I go through those parts of town, the infrastructure is there to accommodate...

• Question by: Valerie Shawcross
• Meeting date: 24 October 2007

It is good that we have got an opportunity to make a step change in the quality of development, particularly in affordable homes, with this Strategy and the Mayor's new powers. We also, as Assembly Members, had a rather robust conversation over lunch with the London Housing Corporation. That was about the very great degree of variance there seems to be at the moment between the housing management standards and the estate management standards - the neighbourhood management standards - between existing housing associations, amongst which there has been a great balkanisation; there are 500 or so housing associations in...

• Question by: Peter Hulme Cross
• Meeting date: 24 October 2007

A little while ago I went to an exhibition at the Building Federation. They were showing what I can only call an updated pre-fabricated house. It was actually a flat. It had a steel frame and it was was in situ, inside this frame. The frame could be put on the back of a lorry and taken to a site and bolted together. You could construct, effectively, a block of flats in modular fashion and all you had to do, having plonked it there, was to connect up electricity and water. The whole thing was centrally heated, and worked just...

• Question by: Jenny Jones
• Meeting date: 24 October 2007

That is going to be true even with the new powers.

• Question by: Jenny Jones
• Meeting date: 24 October 2007

What about enforcement?

• Question by: Jenny Jones
• Meeting date: 24 October 2007

Could I stop you there. I have got some questions and not very much time. Perhaps I can ask all my questions then you can just answer as best you can. The first question is how are you going to enforce all this, because that always seems to be the problem with councils actually being able to enforce codes. My view on all this, about trying to get to Level 3, is that it is just utterly unambitious. If you think that the houses we build now are going to be here for at least 50 years and possibly 100...

• Question by: Mike Tuffrey
• Meeting date: 24 October 2007

Can I just pursue this point, to agree with Jenny's point - the fuel poverty point - that by focusing on the affordable housing you get an added social benefit, but the Strategy focuses on the larger strategic developments. Isn't there a lot more that we can be doing given that I think the statistic is that 98% of all residential completions in the last year for which figures were available, were fewer than 100. By focusing on the larger ones we are missing the greater number. Are you satisfied that enough is going on to get the standards up...

• Question by: Sally Hamwee
• Meeting date: 24 October 2007

Before we move on to the next question I wonder if I could just ask you this: you have referred, Neale and David, to the relatively short time period covered by the Strategy. Leaving aside issues of the outcomes of elections and so on, what is anticipated in terms of roll forward of the Strategy, revision after it has been adopted and when a new one would come, or a revised one would come, onto the stocks to take us beyond 2011?

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 14 June 2006

The good students of Malmesbury School might be interested to know that out of all this chaos we have a bunch of Assembly Members quizzing the man who is responsible for delivering the Olympic Games in London. By the time they are voters, the Olympics will be finished. The area of the Olympics will be regenerated, and there will be many jobs there. Mr Higgins has already said that he wants to put other people on the spot to make sure it is not just the Olympics delivering all of these benefits, but it is the whole regeneration of the...

• Question by: Darren Johnson
• Meeting date: 08 September 2005

If their input is going to be meaningful, it cannot be after the contracts have been let, and the horse has bolted, as it were. It also cannot just be producing more imaginative, visionary statements that do not translate into practical reality on the ground.