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• Question by: Damian Hockney
• Meeting date: 17 January 2007

Our pensioners, Mr Newton, I am sure will take great heart I have to say from what I regard as a very responsible stand and your defence of their interests so I do congratulate you for that. One thing occurred to me. Obviously some people round here have talked about ethical investment and ethical being from their own stance. I totally accept and respect their position. Is there a possibility - and I certainly would not want such a thing; I do not want my pension being played as part of politics, even with things that I believe in personally...

• Question by: Damian Hockney
• Meeting date: 17 January 2007

I think the main point is that if we do have even minor falls this ongoing amount of money taken from pensioners in Britain will have an impact. Do you still have forecasts and estimates for what will happen ongoing, say over the next five to ten years as a result of it?

• Question by: Damian Hockney
• Meeting date: 17 January 2007

If it were removed, how helpful would that be? Say it were removed next year, how helpful would that be to the London Pensions Fund?

• Reference: 2007/0009
• Question by: Damian Hockney
• Meeting date: 17 January 2007

By how much has the current value of the fund been reduced as a consequence of the removal in 1997 of tax credits on share dividends and what impact has this had on the value of pensions paid by the fund?

• 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...