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• 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: 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: 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...

• Question by: John Biggs
• Meeting date: 19 July 2006

I would like to take a slightly less negative approach than the UK Independence Party (UKIP) on this issue. The ability of EU funds to transform other areas of Europe where there is experience of poverty has been quite significant, and, given that there are areas of considerable poverty within London, and you may not be able to answer this, but can you think of examples of good practice elsewhere and has, for example, the Child Poverty Action Group, looked at examples of good practice in other European states which could be echoed and mirrored and copied and stolen to...