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• Reference: 2010/0106-1
• Question by: Nicky Gavron
• Meeting date: 20 October 2010

Is there adequate strategic leadership of housing policy and its implementation in London?

• Question by: Murad Qureshi
• Meeting date: 20 October 2010

Last week it was announced that the Office for Tenants and Social Landlords, otherwise known as Tenant Services Authority (TSA), was to be devolved and no longer a public body. I am just wondering in the context of housing devolution in London where all these regulatory powers will be going.

• Question by: Nicky Gavron
• Meeting date: 20 October 2010

You talked about levers and about your optimism about new flexibility and new innovative ways of delivering housing in the future. I have seen somewhere that tax incremental financing (TIF) is at last being considered. Could you shed any light on this? What form of TIF would it be and how would you use it to help social housing?

• Question by: Valerie Shawcross
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

I think you used the phrase `extremely excluded', and I would be interested to hear what disaggregated information there is about the people in poverty that we are talking about, because my experience has been that there are some people in our communities, some communities in fact, which are so extremely poor and excluded that I am not sure that the state is even capable of inter-meshing with the levels of poverty that they are experiencing. For example, there are members of the Somalian community in London, of whom probably more than 75% are unemployed, who cannot afford to dress...

• Question by: Nicky Gavron
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

These families are generally led by women; I wondered how significant you thought the gender pay-gap in London was, which is increasing - widening - here, whereas it isn't in the rest of the country. I understand that the most typical job for a woman here is paid at £5.30 an hour, whereas the most typical job for a man is paid at £17.50 an hour.

• Question by: Murad Qureshi
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

I was just wondering what the impact of the minimum wage has been in London in reducing relative poverty. Clearly, it affects those in employment, rather than those outside it, but I would like some idea of what the experts feel has been the impact.

• Question by: Nicky Gavron
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

You've just said that the proportion of children living below the poverty line in lone-parent families is high ' I do not know if you have the exact figures?

• Question by: Murad Qureshi
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

I understand that there should be a London rate, and I think there has been work done on that, on the living wage. Coming back to Kate (Green)'s point that tax credits are more significant, one of the experiences I have come across is that the bureaucracy of targeted financial programmes can be such that it actually puts off a lot of people from sitting down and putting in the applications that they are perfectly entitled to make. I don't know if you have got any thoughts on that, and how that can be cleared up so that it's a...

• 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: Valerie Shawcross
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

So, do you think that there is much more potential for the faith sector to address problems, and help the most extremely poor communities to move on, if they had more support from the state.