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• Reference: 2006/0226-1
• Question by: Damian Hockney
• Meeting date: 11 October 2006

What criteria were used when the LDA decided to sponsor the Mayor's Caribbean Showcase event at a cost to the taxpayer of £215,000 (£120,000 directly and £95,000 through its offshoot "Creative London")?

• Question by: Damian Hockney
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

I just want to briefly return to this business of definitions, because some mathematicians have calculated that one of the reasons why there are so many variations in different countries about what is defined on the 60% median of people in poverty is because, quite simply, if you change your tax structure slightly, if in Britain the Government were simply to tax slightly more heavily those just above the poverty level, you could, at a stroke, to use an old phrase, remove half a million people from poverty. Now, even if we accept these definitions, and I appreciate, Kate (Kate...

• Question by: Damian Hockney
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

Would you all support the idea, then, of removing from tax, the poor, as other countries are gradually doing? We should stop taking money away from the ones we are defining as poor, which leaves them poor, and creates dependency upon the state, while still worrying about the number of and the percentage of people in poverty. Surely, we should strip out their tax, get rid of their taxation, remove it. Many of them will then immediately not be poor. Surely we would all agree with that.

• Question by: Damian Hockney
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

Do any of you know how our Structural Fund for Objective Two or Three, in London has been used to deal with things like poverty? Anything you could point to: that is a marvellous idea, or that is a very bad idea?

• Question by: Damian Hockney
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

Obviously you all know my opinions on the EU and Structural Funds. It is a very bureaucratic, arthritic way of getting back a tiny proportion of the money that we have to give to the EU. Would it not be nice to have all of that money here to be able to do the things we would like to do with poverty, with unemployment, and so on? It's not an ideal way, and are we not going to lose a lot of that in the next aspects of funding, because a lot of the accession countries are going to take...

• Question by: Damian Hockney
• Meeting date: 07 December 2005

Thank you for that. All the businesses I have spoken to, including of course Pullmans et al, have all said that there is no circumstance in which they -- they are clearly aware and they had never asked. Can you confirm then that some businesses have asked for amounts of four, five, six times the amount? Have they, because you have not actually answered that question? You said they have aspirations but the point is that the Mayor said that people ' in a very public statement in the Sun newspaper ' that they are asking, many businesses are asking...

• Question by: Damian Hockney
• Meeting date: 07 December 2005

Just very briefly: can you possibly confirm something for me? You mentioned obviously the uplift to £1 billion and I was not quite sure whether that was an uplift from the £743 million to £1 billion or for just the £478 million.

• Reference: 2005/0590-1
• Question by: Damian Hockney
• Meeting date: 07 December 2005

Can the LDA confirm that no Marshgate Lane business has attempted to negotiate a deal based on the value that the land is likely to command (ie four or five times greater than the current market value of the premises) once it has been acquired by the LDA?