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• Question by: Angie Bray
• Meeting date: 15 November 2006

I think that you will have to appreciate our concern about the way the goalposts keep changing. You talked about the cost of the actual buildings being reasonably on track but of course there were no designs costed out, so that suggests to us that the designs are going to cost more than the original costings. There was no VAT, you have quite rightly pointed out. You also keep talking about a revised Masterplan. I think you will agree we can be forgiven for thinking that this is a very, very flexible costing system. Given that you have already told...

• 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: 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...