Appendix 3
London Assembly (Extraordinary Plenary) – 7 February 2008
Transcript of Question and Answer Session with Mayor of London
Sally Hamwee (Chair): Mr Mayor, I dare say you have had a report of the areas covered this morning which, to a considerable extent, were regarding the role of your advisers. Can I start by asking a question which I asked of the London Development Agency (LDA), about the line between acceptable and unacceptable interventions in operational matters by your advisers? What is your view of where that line should be drawn?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I think that the guidance clearly comes from the White Paper the Government published about what the powers of the Mayor and the Mayor’s Office should be in the run up to the creation of the Mayoralty. I will quote: “The Mayor’s Office will be expected to ensure that the Mayor’s policies are delivered. Staff appointed to the Mayor’s Office will have direct day to day contact with those implementing the Mayor’s strategies and will speak for the Mayor on those issues”.
I think that makes it absolutely clear what government envisaged was not the traditional relationship between the elected politician and ‘Sir Humphrey’ in Yes, Minister, but it was clearly anticipated this was the American system; the directly elected executive which can be characterised in a sarcastic way as personal fiefdom but is actually a line of responsibility the electorate recognises as absolutely clear. If something goes wrong, the Mayor is to blame. These are the Mayor’s appointments and the Mayor’s policies.
Sally Hamwee (Chair): I thought the personal fiefdom was how you had characterised it.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): No, no, I am afraid that is my enemies again.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): Can I pick up from where you left off? Is not the truth that you were right some years ago when you warned about the dangers of the American system? Is not the truth that we have a half American system; we have a strong Mayor but no strong checks and balances? Is not the truth of that old saying that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): The position I think is rather different from that. We do not replicate the American system exactly. I do not appoint the Finance Officer. I do not appoint the Head of Law. They used to be appointed by you and, under the changes, will be joint appointments in the future. In the American system the people appointed are solely answerable to the Mayor or to the President. Our Head of Finance, our Head of Law and our Head of Paid Service have independent legal duties that enable them to say no to the Mayor and the Chief Executive has this fairly ill-defined power to remove the Mayor from office.
It is quite interesting. We have just been through two years of consultation about the Mayor’s powers. It did not occur to any Member of the Assembly to propose an amendment to the
1 legislation to shift the balance of power away from the Mayor’s appointees. None of you raised it. The Assembly submitted many suggestions about how the legislation could change but also no Conservative or Liberal Democrat Member got to their feet throughout in either House to question this or propose a change.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): We submitted a raft of amendments to give the Assembly proper powers of scrutiny, proper control over your Budget, proper ability to approve or disapprove of your appointments, proper ability to influence and indeed approve your strategies and you opposed all of those. You have spent the last eight years revelling in your power and our impotence and the chickens are coming home to roost.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): That is not actually correct. I said at the beginning of my administration that although I could protect my personal appointees from your scrutiny in the case of the two that were appointed, I would not do that. You are free to summon them and question them at any time. I think Londoners will find it beyond belief that with all this row you have never once invited Lee Jasper to come here and question him directly. He is free to do so. He will come if you request him.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): For the record I will be moving an amendment when we have finished questioning you – we want to hear your evidence first – precisely to do that; to invite your Mayoral advisers and your Chief of Staff to come before us and give us an account.
Let me pursue this point about the role of Mayoral advisers. We heard this morning that the view of the Chief Executive of the LDA is that in a number of instances Lee Jasper was involved in a way that the Chief Executive disapproves of. It was inappropriate; I would say it was improper. Was he acting under your say so? Did you authorise him to behave in that way or was he out of control?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): In what way was he inappropriate?
Mike Tuffrey (AM): The way he sent emails, gave instructions. Have you not had a report of this morning’s proceedings?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I have not met the Chief Executive. I think he went straight on holiday after appearing before you.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): The Chief Executive told us on the public record this morning that the way that Lee Jasper had intervened on a number of instances that we quoted to him was inappropriate. I said it was improper and he wriggled in his seat and said he did not think that was the right way to behave. He said that they had informal procedures and protocols that were not being followed and indeed, as a result of all this brouhaha, which the media and we have instigated, not you, there is now a full governance review under way at the request of the LDA being conducted by our Chief Executive.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): The reality is on all of this we in my administration have followed a real policy of making certain policies are delivered. The White Paper spells out
2 clearly my appointees are there to make sure the machine delivers. I quote David Cameron [Leader of the Opposition] who said if there had not been a directly elected Mayor of London we would never have got beat police back on the streets. It is that ability to intervene that actually delivers that.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): I notice you have not answered my question about whether Lee Jasper, when he was behaving in the way he was this morning, inappropriately in relation to the LDA, was doing so under your authorisation or not?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): If you would like to read out to me the email you think is inappropriate I will give you an opinion.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): I am sure colleagues will pursue this. We have an 800 page document and I will quote that to you but it is absolutely on the record that Lee Jasper was involved in a way that the Chief Executive of the LDA was not happy with, to put it mildly.
Can I ask you this; when all these allegations first surfaced in December your response was, “Isolated problem, fraction of the LDA’s funding, full audit trail, no case to answer, all a political plot” got up by your opponents. What we now know is that this is not isolated; the LDA is now conducting, we learnt this morning under our questioning, a systematic review of all their historic grants, so concerned is the Board at what else might be there. We know that far from there being a full audit trail the police have had to be called in on six instances. We know that there are no procedures documented around how Mayoral advisers should behave. Is not the truth that your administration is out of control and your office and your aides are intervening across the GLA family in ways which are simply inappropriate and go way beyond any view of the Act or the procedures authorised by Parliament?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): What you quoted me as saying at the beginning I think is absolutely accurate. The LDA has an audit trail of the grants it gives. It cannot intervene to look into bank accounts but in terms of the budget it allocates, the purpose of the projects, the outputs that are delivered and the justification for the projects, that audit trail is there. The LDA issues grants on a monthly or quarterly basis, depending, and does not give a further grant if they are not satisfied that the previous expenditure has been appropriate.
Far from this being something that has come to light because of the Evening Standard, on the grants that originally were matters of concern, the LDA had already intervened to examine where they were unhappy, and where that audit trail was not clear that the money was being adequately spent, and it is the LDA that called in the District Auditor to oversee the results of their inquiry and, where they cannot get access to bank accounts and personal details, have passed it to the police.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): So there is not a full audit trail and far from it being an isolated incident of a few fractions of a percentage, it is much more deep seated.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): It is a fraction; it is under one tenth of one per cent.
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Mike Tuffrey (AM): That is today’s allegations. However, what the LDA is now doing is conducting a systematic review of all their historic grants under the instruction of the Board. That is what Manny Lewis told us this morning. So the concern is -
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): You would be complaining if we were not.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): Quite.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): You have made all these allegations. The Evening Standard has made all these allegations. We are dealing with one tenth of one per cent of the budget but we are going to go through everything else because we are going to demonstrate it is all above board.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): No, because there are concerns that this is not just a storm in a teacup but it is the tip of an iceberg. Can I quote you -
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): There are not concerns to that effect. The LDA is acting appropriately to make sure the damage that you and your associates in the media are doing to the reputation of the LDA will be roundly rejected.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): The LDA’s reputation would be greatly enhanced if they came clean on what is going on and answered our questions fair and square instead of us having to drag it out of them.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): When you set out to investigate the six cultural projects you do not like and you commissioned work from an independent auditor --
Damian Hockney (AM): Not that we don’t like.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): - you instructed them not to talk to the LDA. What sort of investigation is that? Were you worried they would not find something you did not like?
Mike Tuffrey (AM): You asked me a question. Are you not aware that on 20 September last year – so a matter of months ago – Lee Jasper wrote to LDA officers by email concerning Brixton Base’s removal from unauthorised areas within Offley Works. He said, “In relation to the matter below can you put a stop to this process and call me immediately please”. That is tantamount to an instruction from your office to a junior LDA officer, which Manny Lewis thinks is inappropriate.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Brixton Base was a really innovative project working with the most difficult kids; the ones on the borderline of being involved in drugs. It is not going to be run like a vicarage tea party. It got into trouble. The objective is, can you save it or do you pull the plug?
Mike Tuffrey (AM): Just answer the question.
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Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): That is exactly the robust approach to civil servants I expect my staff to take. I do not expect them to like it.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): So he was acting then on your authority, in which case we will take that further.
Richard Barnes (AM): This morning Mr Lewis, the Chief Executive of the London Development Agency, said there was confusion as to when Mr Lee Jasper was acting as Patron of Brixton Base and when he was acting as a Mayoral adviser. How would you expect a junior member of staff at the LDA to differentiate between the two?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I would expect in Lee Jasper’s interventions he is always acting as one of my staff and not as the Patron of an organisation. That is the only basis on which he could intervene and you will notice he intervened using GLA headed paper, making it absolutely clear.
Richard Barnes (AM): Would you have expected him then to have declared somewhere that he had an interest in Brixton Base as its Patron? Indeed I understand, from the papers given to us, that the inception of Brixton Base was his.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Lee Jasper has no financial interest in Brixton Base; he is a Patron. I am a Patron of about 30 or 40 organisations where everything from back pain to respite care have said, “Would the Mayor be a Patron?” I do not have any day-to-day involvement in running those. Lee [Jasper] had more of an involvement in making sure Brixton Base succeeded but that was because this is an area where we want to see progress. These are exactly the sort of kids where, if you cannot intervene, they end up with a knife or with a gun and dead on the pavement.
Richard Barnes (AM): Pecuniary and non-pecuniary interests are two different things. If he is actively involved and supportive of Brixton Base, would you not you have expected him to be upfront and to declare his interest, non-pecuniary, in Brixton Base?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): When he was intervening he was intervening as one of my advisers. Brixton Base makes it absolutely clear on all their headed notepaper that Lee Jasper is a Patron. This is not some great conspiracy that no one was told.
Richard Barnes (AM): No, I agree. I notice that but I would have expected somewhere within the Assembly or Authority declarations that it would have been there?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): It is often unclear what should and should not be declared.
Richard Barnes (AM): The advice given to us by lawyers is if in doubt, declare.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Yes. But it is also often unclear what should and should not be declared. Can I say I think what I just said is complete rubbish and I am amazed
5 you have not stopped me? It is clear what should be declared. I was merely quoting one of you; Bob Blackman, two weeks ago, explaining why a Tory Councillor in Brent had not declared £500.
Richard Barnes (AM): I am really not particularly interested in that.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I am amazed none of you intervened as so obviously what I said was complete bollocks!
Richard Barnes (AM): Mr Mayor, we are are so used to that, we just ignore it!
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): One law for Bob Blackman’s Tory friends; personal gifts.
Richard Barnes (AM): Mr Mayor, Mr Lewis also made it clear this morning that he had not advised you prior to your interview with the BBC on 5 December. He also made it clear to the Assembly that the London Development Agency had doubts about Brixton Base and that they were doing further investigation for the audit trail. Where did you get your information that the LDA had chapter and verse on each project and that every penny could be accounted for when the Chief Executive has made it clear that that was not the case and he had not so advised you?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): That is as I said earlier; the LDA agrees the budgets, defines the purpose of projects, sets outputs, has a justification for the project and if it starts to break down they stop funding. That is why, well before this appeared in the media, the LDA had intervened to send the auditors in to look at Brixton Base.
Richard Barnes (AM): Exactly, well before this appeared in the media the LDA intervened, but your statement is that every penny can be accounted for. I wonder upon what you have based that clear statement?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): The LDA intervened with Brixton Base before anything appeared in the media by several weeks.
Richard Barnes (AM): Exactly. That was at 10 am on 5 December. Your interview was 12 o’clock on 5 December. I am asking upon what did you base your statement that every penny can be accounted for when the LDA was clearly doing further investigation to account for every penny?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I had not been personally briefed about any one individual organisation.
Richard Barnes (AM): So you made it up?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): No, I did not make it up. Those are the rules that we have established for the LDA; that they fund, they check and they monitor. If they have any doubts about the spending they stop giving more funding until they sort it out -
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Richard Barnes (AM): - which they had. Were you not told that they were doing an investigation?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I came into the building, I was approached by Tim Donovan [BBC reporter], based on the stuff that had appeared in the Evening Standard which I had not at that stage read, I explained what the policy is in relation to grants by the LDA, I had complete confidence that these things will be sorted out and identified. As soon as I had done the interview I went upstairs to my office. I phoned Manny Lewis. I asked him whether he had any concerns about the involvement of any of my staff in this, which was the nature of the Standard allegation; he assured me he did not.
Richard Barnes (AM): Would you have expected the Patron of Brixton Base to be aware that the LDA is conducting further audits?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I couldn’t hear the start of your question because you were talking over me.
Richard Barnes (AM): I do apologise, Mr Mayor.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Good.
Richard Barnes (AM): I will talk at you. Would you have expected the Patron of Brixton Base to be aware that the LDA, given his close involvement with it, was conducting a further audit and further examination of Brixton Base?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I did not talk to Lee Jasper so I would not be able to answer that.
Richard Barnes (AM): No, I did not ask that. I said, would you expect him to be aware?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Why don’t you invite him in and ask him?
Richard Barnes (AM): We are are going to.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I think it is a big mistake to ask me what I think Lee Jasper might or might not have known when he’s free to answer your questions.
Richard Barnes (AM): I am trying to find out why you told London that every penny could be accounted for when it could not?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Because until we got the result of the audit investigation a couple of weeks ago, we did not know.
Tony Arbour (AM): Well why didn’t you say so?
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Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Hang on. We did not know any money was not accounted for.
Richard Barnes (AM): Why didn’t you say this is being investigated? Why did you give this categorical assurance on 5 December that every penny could be accounted for when it could not, and when the LDA had already started a further investigation.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Do you want the answer, or not? No, you don’t want the answer, do you?
Richard Barnes (AM): No, I want you to understand the question.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): You want to carry on smearing people that work for me. The truth is I spelled out what the policy is. All these grants have to be accounted for. The moment there is any doubt that they are being improperly spent, funding stops. That is what had happened in this case. Auditors were sent in. Two weeks ago we got the report that identified 14% of the grant they had been given could not be accounted for. That is why we passed it to the police. Now, I could not have said that in December because we only got it two weeks ago.
Richard Barnes (AM): The LDA had already started their investigation prior to 5 December. Mr Lewis told us that this morning.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): They sent the auditors in and we got the report two weeks ago. I do not have the ability to see the future.
Richard Barnes (AM): You did on 5 December.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): No, I did not. I said what our policy is.
Richard Barnes (AM): Even though the auditors had been sent in, you said every penny could be accounted for. Are you now retracting what you said on 5 December?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): No. I explained to Tim Donovan what the policy of the LDA is; that every penny of the grants we give has to be accounted for. That does not mean to say every one will be accounted for, but as soon as we think anything is untoward we stop the grant until we can be assured there is nothing untoward.
Richard Barnes (AM): So you accept and support the LDA’s referral of Brixton Base to the police for further investigation, and you withdraw what you said on 5 December because clearly the policy has been broken?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): No, the policy has not been broken. The moment the LDA became aware that all the funding could not be accounted for, they sent in the auditors to investigate what was going on. We now have that. We had it two weeks ago. Had we had it in
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December I could have said to Tim Donovan, “14% of the grant is unaccounted for. We are going to send it to the police”. But we could not do that until two weeks ago.
Richard Barnes (AM): So your statement, “Every penny can be accounted for”, - can be accounted for; – not the policy is that every penny should be accounted for – was an anticipation of that report, which was wrong?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): No. Get it in context. I am being interviewed downstairs on the back of an interview about the £78 million of funding for youth initiatives. Tim Donovan is aggressively questioning me; that is his job. It is not a calculated statement of law; it is not a written policy document; it is an exchange with a reporter and I encapsulated what the LDA policy is. Every penny is accounted for. If we think there is anything untoward we stop the funding until we can be certain and reassured.
Richard Barnes (AM): I think you are being disingenuous in your answers, Mr Mayor.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): No, the policy stays the same today. The LDA expects every penny of its grants to be accounted for. If it is not confident that is being done it suspends the funding.
Richard Barnes (AM): So you were restating policy, not making a comment in support of Brixton Base and your leading adviser who is Patron of it?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I could not. At that stage I had no specific briefing about any one grant. What I had seen was the banner headlines in the Evening Standard suggesting my staff were involved in fraud and I was 100% certain that that was not true.
Darren Johnson (AM): Andrew Travers’ report for the LDA makes clear that there was no evidence of fraud, corruption or collusion within the LDA. However he did point to some weaknesses in process and some shortcomings in process. That really is my concern. I absolutely agree with the objectives you have set out in funding these various groups but I have some serious concerns about the process. Would you agree with the recommendation from Andrew that there needs to be clear guidance for Mayoral Policy Directors in terms of how they engage with LDA Officers?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): As specified in the White Paper it should be clear to all staff. Let me explain how this works. I have made it absolutely clear to Manny [Lewis], as I made it clear to Bob Kiley [former Commissioner of Transport] and to Peter Hendy [Commissioner of Transport] that my staff are there to advise. They will intervene aggressively and robustly if they think things are not being delivered or if they think we are not being given good and robust advice.
Darren Johnson (AM): Advice can sometimes sound like instructions, can’t it?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): My staff are there to deliver the policy. If things are not happening, if ‘Sir Humphrey’ is getting in the way, ‘Sir Humphrey’ gets a big push. That is
9 the only reason we have been able to deliver the policies we have. This has been absolutely clear.
Manny Lewis, if you had asked him, would tell you, as would Peter Hendy. There has never been an instance in eight years where my policy advisers have advised me to go in a particular direction contrary to the wishes of the Chief Executive of the LDA or the Commissioner of Transport and I have overridden his advice in support of my advisers. My advisers will tell you they have often said, “We think this should be done a different way”. I have had that debate robustly between my advisers and Manny and with my advisers and Peter Hendy. However, at the end of the day, when the heads of the organisations say, “No, I think that is not the way to do it” I have backed them and not backed my advisers. The head of the LDA and the Commissioner of Transport are not there to be office boys.
Darren Johnson (AM): Would you welcome some clear written protocols on both the GLA side and the LDA side to ensure that these are absolutely clear.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I think it is absolutely clear at senior levels; they know the situation. I think what would be really useful would be to take that White Paper and put it into slightly clearer fashion, looking at examples, and make sure all the staff that might at some time, occasionally, engage with my senior staff should therefore be aware of it. You would not want someone too far down the food chain to think that they are being given an order when they are not.
Darren Johnson (AM): When one of your advisers is pursuing an issue, do they need your express authority to pursue that issue or are they left to interpret your wishes?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): No. If I can give an example; I should imagine once or twice a week John Ross [Director, Economic and Business Policy] or Redmond O’Neill [Director, Public Affairs and Transport] will come into my office and say, “I need a steer from you on where we are going” on this or that issue or policy. That is the way it has to work. Nine times out of ten they know exactly what I will want and they can operate for me as the Act says and represent and speak for me on these issues. There will be occasions when they do not know. At that stage they cannot make it up themselves; they have to come back to me. That is why, when I am on holiday, if you check the phone bills, there are always two, three or four phone calls every day between me and the GLA.
Darren Johnson (AM): There might be, when they are playing a role on behalf of another organisation, say that they are Patron of or whatever, that they are not specifically interpreting your wishes in that way?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I do urge you finally after this, what is it, ten weeks of this rubbish, to summon Lee [Jasper] and question him directly. He will tell you he was acting as my adviser and not as Patron of Brixton Base. Had he been acting as Patron of Brixton Base he would not have been able to use the GLA resources to do it and he would have needed to make it clear that is how he was operating.
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Darren Johnson (AM): This shows exactly why we do need some clear protocols here in writing to clear up this, because even Manny Lewis this morning had exactly the opposite view; he said here before this very Assembly this morning that he thought Lee [Jasper] was acting on behalf of Brixton Base.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I absolutely agree with you. I think we need to put this in writing so it is absolutely clear for all layers of the bureaucracy. I am not disagreeing with you. I think this is a genuine area of confusion and the problem is it is left to the officer who is being contacted by my staff to work out if there is a conflict there, and in what role. That is clearly not right and we will have to make it clear in the future.
Darren Johnson (AM): That is helpful.
Dee Doocey (AM): I want to talk to you about Diversity International. I want to quote from a memo from Manny Lewis to Lee Jasper dated 22 April. Manny Lewis wrote to Lee Jasper explaining that Diversity International was on the verge of bankruptcy and the credit checks confirmed that. The background was Diversity International had already had nearly £500,000 of tax payers’ money for something that they did not produce. We will not go into that. And they were looking for another £100,000. Manny Lewis wrote to Lee Jasper saying he did not think they should get any more money because they were just come back for more and he said, “My inclination is that we should get a different supplier”.
Lee Jasper presumably, taking what you have said, wrote back on your behalf, or acting on your behalf and, remembering that you did not want the Head of the LDA to be treated as an ‘office boy’, saying, “I found this information extremely disturbing. Your email raises several questions. I need you to carefully consider all this before we meet. This will allow me to ensure I have fully understood what’s being proposed and the underpinning facts supporting your suggestions”.
I would have thought that it should have been Lee Jasper who was making suggestions to Manny Lewis, not the other way round. However, the thing that gives me most concern is he says, “I am not convinced that your proposed course of action”, that is not giving any more money, not throwing any more money after this £500,000, “would result in anything other than huge delays and a negatively critical impact on the reputation of the LDA and the Mayor’s Office”.
Now why on earth should your adviser – who, in my view, acts much more like an enforcer – his prime concern be the reputation of the GLA and the Mayor’s Office. Shouldn’t it be the fact that £500,000 had already been spent of taxpayers’ money and Manny Lewis was saying he did not want to spend another £100,000 of taxpayers’ money?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Look at the whole thing here. Diversity International had been awarded a contract before Lee Jasper knew about it. Once he knew about I think his email says, “I am not certain these people will deliver”.
Dee Doocey (AM): That is not the question.
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Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Hang on; I am sorry you do not like the answer but you have to let me answer in my own way. Lee [Jasper] had had real doubts about their ability to deliver. When it started to unwind Lee [Jasper] is clearly concerned that we might get nothing out of this and that the whole thing goes down the pan. What we were able to do in the end, after a period of robust debate about the way forward, was I think for just over £1,000 to buy the copyright or trademark and operation and take it over without having to give them any more money.
Dee Doocey (AM): It is absolute nonsense!
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): What is the end result?
Dee Doocey (AM): What you are doing is you are just selecting bits of information that just are not borne out by the email correspondence.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I am not selecting bits of information.
Dee Doocey (AM): But you are.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I am taking the fact at the start that Lee Jasper felt they would not deliver and I am taking the fact at the end that without giving in to their demand for hundreds of thousands of pounds we were able to acquire, for about £1,000, the copyright or whatever for their website and therefore they did not get the money they wanted.
Dee Doocey (AM): Sorry, you are just using my time. The fact is £500,000 was spent of tax payers’ money and, at the end of it, there was no diagnostic tool, no website and you got nothing for £500,000 worth of money.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): That is what Lee Jasper advised against. Lee Jasper advised against them getting it because he did not think they would deliver. He turned out to be right. In all that exchange between Lee [Jasper], Manny [Lewis] and I think the other senior staff there, Manny [Lewis] is totally aware that, at the end of the day, his decision will prevail because I have never overridden his decision.
Dee Doocey (AM): It is absolute nonsense. You are just putting up yet more smokescreens. This is what you do all the time. Instead of saying “There is a problem let’s deal with it, let’s get it into the open air, let’s do something about it”, the fact that £500,000 of tax payers’ money has just been flushed down the toilet is of total indifference to you and indeed to your adviser.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): The reality here is that Lee Jasper felt that this organisation was not up to it and advised against it. This is one case where we would all be a lot better off if Lee Jasper’s advice had been taken by the LDA.
Dee Doocey (AM): Do you think if you keep saying the same thing over and over again that you are going to hide the fact that £500,000 worth of tax payers’ money has just been blown?
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Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): It happens to be true, because Lee Jasper’s advice was not followed. Good on Lee Jasper. If only they had listened!
Dee Doocey (AM): I am out of time.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Can I just say I cleared my evening in case we were going on until 9 pm or 10 pm? I really think it is wholly unreasonable, after all these allegations, that Members here should be curtailed from asking any question they want. I am prepared to stay here as long as it takes until every one of you has had an answer to every question you wish to ask. That is my offer. So let Dee carry on. Why don’t you have a vote? Vote on it.
Sally Hamwee (Chair): I suspect that it is not possible to get through every question, not least because it has not been possible to examine all of the material. I know that some people in the room feel that getting to the end of the questions means until you – whoever the other you is – agree with me, so I suspect we may not get there. This is not something that we are going to conclude tonight and we have already discussed the desirability, which seems to be shared all around the room, of putting some of these questions to the Mayoral advisers themselves. I am just giving that as context; I am not trying to stop a vote on it.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I am happy to come back tomorrow. I know you are not getting overtime tonight but I do not think that should influence your decision. You should be prepared to stay as long as it takes.
John Ross (Policy Director - Economic and Business Policy, GLA): [off microphone] You don’t have to wait; I can answer any time -
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): John is prepared to join me now and answer any question you wish to put to him. I will phone Lee Jasper if you want and bring him here tonight to answer your questions directly. Now, why don’t you vote on it?
Sally Hamwee (Chair): I am not going to deal with it in that way because I want Members to be properly prepared. We have already had John on the floor of this Chamber once today.
If Members have a proposition to put, bearing in mind that there will be other occasions whatever we do tonight, then I will take it. Do you have a proposition?
John Biggs (AM): I have two propositions, Chair. The first is I am very happy and our Group is very happy to wave the rule about proportionality and to extend the business for as long as Members have questions.
Second, if Members have a pressing need to get away to see a musical or something – I know one Member has such a need but I will not embarrass him – we would be happy for the meeting to adjourn to a time which is convenient for us to continue a ruthless and endless interrogation of the Mayor.
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Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): It is obviously difficult for some Members at night and so on. I am prepared to bring Lee Jasper, John Ross and anyone else you want here any time tomorrow to start and go through until you expire or we run out of questions.
John Ross (Policy Director - Economic and Business Policy, GLA): [off microphone] Why don’t you put the question to the Mayoral adviser who you’re attempting -
Sally Hamwee (Chair): John, I’m afraid you’re not part of the meeting at this point.
Darren Johnson (AM): My proposal was a more modest version of John’s [Biggs]. I simply do not think, even if we cannot deal with everything, that we can deal very much at all in an hour. I propose that we at least double the session to two hours of questioning for the Mayor so at least we can get some reasonable questions in and time for some hopefully reasonable answers. Therefore, I am proposing we extend the session from one hour to two hours.
Sally Hamwee (Chair): Would that be agreeable to people?
All: Yes.
Sally Hamwee (Chair): Right. OK. We will do that. Thank you for your offer, Mr Mayor.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): Could I make clear that we actually asked you to come this morning. We are meeting now at your convenience, not ours. Secondly, we had 12 huge files to go through and more material yesterday and more material on our desks today, now, half an hour ago. If we are to conduct proper scrutiny we have to prepare ourselves. We have only, to suit your convenience, prepared ourselves for this short session tonight.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): This is outrageous. It is not my convenience. You chose to convene a meeting while there was the opening of the Stephen Lawrence Centre. I was there and people were saying, “Everyone in London is here, where’s the Assembly?” Only you could be so out of touch with London you did not know that was happening.
Sally Hamwee (Chair): I wonder whether we could, in a moment, get back to the substance of this. I certainly did not have an invitation to the opening. There was a phone call made to your office. Of course I would not have done such a thing. Indeed when I heard from you that that was where you would be this morning I had a look on the website to see what arrangements there were for the opening of the Stephen Lawrence Centre and I could not find anything at that point.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): Quite. So if you could withdraw your smear that we were invited and chose to have a session that would be helpful. I have not – and I do not think any other Assembly Member that I am aware of has – had an invitation to that event and, as Sally says, when the checks were made to your office that was not the case. Just so everybody knows, I am going to be proposing an amendment at the end of the session, having heard your evidence, that we do indeed call Simon Fletcher, John Ross and Lee Jasper to us at our next meeting when we can prepare and they can have a chance to prepare themselves.
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John Ross (Policy Director - Economic and Business Policy, GLA): [off microphone] Why do you have to wait? I am here. I can answer any time you like.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): He has been so eager. You are denying him his moment.
John Ross (Policy Director - Economic and Business Policy, GLA): [off microphone] I’ll answer any question you like -
Mike Tuffrey (AM): From our side, can I agree with Darren’s [Johnson] suggestion that we extend today and that you are flexible in relation to the clock and the timing to get through the planned questions for today. We will then return to do a proper scrutiny session of the further matters that are coming before us.
Sally Hamwee (Chair): Is it agreed that we go on until around 7.30 pm with questions? We will then have the motion in front of us.
All: Agreed.
Sally Hamwee (Chair): Dee, you were being invited by the Mayor to ask some more questions?
Dee Doocey (AM): Can I come back, because what I was quoting from is in the documents that were just put in front of us when we got down here tonight so I just need to read a bit more. I will come back to you.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I am happy to come back tomorrow, next week, any day, if you need. I understand it is a very extensive file and it has been winnowed down by your own staff and it is still very long.
Valerie Shawcross (AM): Mr Mayor, trying to pick through this smokescreen – though I differ in the view as to who is throwing up the smokescreen – I am trying to identify some bottom lines and the genuine interests of my constituents. Through all this ‘he said, she said’ would you perhaps recognise the following bottom line characterisations. One is that apparently sometimes Lee Jasper sends abrasive emails. Two is that the GLA Act created a novel role of Mayoral adviser for which there were not adequate protocols for declarations of interest, which everybody agrees should now be developed and put in place. Three is that in the early life of the LDA there were apparently some projects, a small number, which got through weak processes and which the current Chief Executive was partly appointed to improve and has carried out due diligence on everything that has been brought to their attention.
In the meantime, there are real people in my constituency who have real issues, because there are young people who are being dragged into gang culture and because we have real gun crime. There are real black organisations, community groups and businesses who feel besmirched and dragged into a debate which has little relevance to the real problems of the community out there. Do you feel that there will be a long term impact of all of this smoke screening going on
15 and this protracted, endless and pointless querying – questioning is what we are here for but the querying is becoming endless, I think – that many community groups will feel that they cannot approach the public sector, that they will feel that they should not stick their head above the battlements in terms of the fight to help young people and empower young people in our community?
I think there is a long term impact of all of this debate and I would call on my colleagues to behave more responsibly in terms of the real interest of the young people and the black community in this city. I wonder, Mr Mayor, if you recognise any of those characterisations?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): All of my staff would be delighted if we can specify and have a clear code about how a relationship should be between my advisers and layers of staff elsewhere. The vast majority of contacts between my advisers are with only the most senior layer of people within the functional bodies. Occasionally – something which everyone agrees we did very well – someone like John Ross will get involved in an immense amount of detail, such as when we were trying to deal with the collapse in tourism figures in the wake of 9/11. John got involved in a level of detail right down to the lowest levels for the recasting of how we tackled that as a tourism issue. There are always going to be, depending on the circumstances, different layers of penetration and involvement.
I think the position on all of this is we have got investigations where the LDA has asked the police to get involved in something like just under one tenth of one per cent of a budget over eight years. I do not know now whether Members of the Assembly are pursuing five, six or seven of the grants awarded but that is over eight years. Two of these grants go right back to the beginning. They have been revived and thrown into all of this.
As Sarah Ebanja, the Deputy Chief Executive [of the LDA], said on the Today programme, this is primarily about an election. Yes, there is a problem with a handful of grants and that must be resolved. If someone has stolen from us they must be prosecuted. What the Standard has done, much more so than Members of this Assembly, is to create a public impression that basically there is a huge network of black crime and black fraud. I am not at all surprised, given that the Evening Standard, that operates in a city where a third of the population is black and Asian, barely employs any black or Asian Londoners, is a personally hostile environment to black staff working for it and it is hostile to the sort of London we have become. I think the Standard’s campaign has been a disgrace.
Peter Hulme Cross (AM): Mr Mayor, I want to quote from an email by Mr Jasper with reference to Brixton Base. This was 15 June 2006. This was to somebody at the LDA. He says, “I am advised that your estate manager … is evicting one of our black flagship projects from OW [Offley Works]. If this is the case can you ensure that this action is withdrawn immediately and ensure that I am consulted on all major decisions affecting those organisations who are based at OW”.
That is pretty strong stuff. Don’t you think that in that case he was exceeding his role as Mayoral adviser?
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Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Now that is an email to Manny Lewis, I think.
Peter Hulme Cross (AM): No, that is an email to Tony Winterbottom who is, I think, a bit lower in the food chain.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Just one layer below. Tony Winterbottom was unlikely to be intimidated by anybody and Manny and the senior staff know, at the end of the day, if they have decided to evict a tenant I am not going to instruct them to reverse it. There may be a very long and robust and often acrimonious debate between my staff and them, but at the end of the day I will not override their professional judgement. The process of delivering policies means you have a very robust debate.
I think you are right. You can absolutely characterise Lee as being robust and occasionally a bit brutal in some of those email exchanges, but who am I to cast the first stone? I have had some pretty brutal meetings in my office with some of the senior personnel from functional bodies and senior people from business from outside. 99 times out of 100 you can sit down and have a reasonable debate with people and it all works in London’s interests. That 1 in 100 times it has to get a bit nasty or London loses out. We would have lost out.
I wanted Brixton Base to succeed. It was never going to be a vicarage tea party and I think it is a tragedy. I do not think it is actually closed but it is not terribly functioning at the moment. When I went down there I was impressed. These were kids that if were not getting them involved were just as likely to end up dead on the streets.
Peter Hulme Cross (AM): I accept what you say there. But what Lee is saying is, “I hear that you’re taking this sort of action. Now I want you to stop it and I want you to tell me everything else that happens”.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): He is doing exactly what he should do, which is to press Tony Winterbottom to be absolutely clear about the consequences of that eviction and to challenge it robustly. Tony Winterbottom knew – because I worked very closely with him on a whole range of projects like the Olympics and so on – that if he was unhappy he could pick up the phone to me and say, “I am going to do this; Lee isn’t happy; is that OK with you?” and I would have said, “Yes, Lee is there to advise, to argue, to debate, to challenge, but not to override your decision”. And Winterbottom knew that.
My worry in all this is if it is someone really low down the food chain, they may be confused about that and we all agree we need some clear statement of principles so that does not happen.
Bob Blackman (AM): Mr Mayor, can we be clear about the briefing that you have had? Obviously you have not seen, I presume, the 893 page document that was presented to us at 9.50 am this morning?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): No, I have had a couple of extracts from it but I am not going to do Manny Lewis’ job for him; it is his job to manage that organisation.
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Bob Blackman (AM): We were told this morning that prior to the LDA Board considering the internal review, you were briefed the night before by the Chair and the Chief Executive on aspects of that. Was it the report that you were given, or were you given any of the evidence around it; can we be clear on what that briefing was like?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): My recollection is that we had Mr Travers, Manny Lewis and Mary [Reilly]. Manny said he felt, in the first instance, this should be a private briefing to me without any of my advisers present. We spent about an hour. They gave me the report; it was a penultimate draft of the report, I think. They took me through it. I asked the best part of an hour of questions. I pressed very strongly whilst I was alone in the room with those people, “Is there anything you are not putting in the report about which I should have concern?” and I was told by Mr Travers, “No”. I pushed him further, “Has in any way Lee Jasper said or done anything that gives you concern” and he said, “No”. I think we proceeded in that vein for a while.
Once we had gone through that report I then summoned, I think, just John Ross – I cannot remember anybody else – so that he was briefed about it and would be able to handle any media enquiries the next day. I made no changes to the report.
Bob Blackman (AM): We have had that confirmed, so thank you for confirming that view. Have you had any other briefings from Manny [Lewis] or Mr Travers about this whole report subsequent to the Board Meeting?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Whilst this media-driven drama unravels, I clearly get phone calls from Manny and I meet Manny [Lewis] occasionally. I just spent an hour at the Board where government ministers, myself and borough councils are planning the post-Olympic use of the site. At the end of that I said, “Could you come in and talk me through what’s in this huge document you’ve given to the Assembly and what you said to the Assembly this morning?” because I have not had the time today to sit down and watch it on TV.
Bob Blackman (AM): No, I do not expect you to.
Can we also be clear; were you briefed on the fact of the internal review being an internal review and, as such, the only people that we have been told were interviewed are people that currently work for the LDA? Your advisers were not interviewed. All we have in terms of evidence is what is in the paper; the email trails. The internal review did not cover any of that aspect. It did not cover any of the organisations or any of the people that did work for the LDA at the time but no longer work for the LDA. It did not seek information from the Evening Standard or anyone else that has made allegations about these particular projects for them to come forward with evidence.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): What you’re describing would be the sort of operation conducted by the police.
Bob Blackman (AM): I understand that.
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Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): You cannot really complain. This Assembly, nine weeks after these allegations, still has not summoned my advisers to question them. How can you be surprised that Mr Travers did not?
Bob Blackman (AM): OK. Moving on to -
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): As I’m not surprised.
Bob Blackman (AM): No, no, no, because -
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): The reason is you are quite happy for these smears to carry on in the press is you do not want my staff here answering because that will end it, won’t it.
Sally Hamwee (Chair): Mr Mayor, you have been told by at least two Members of the Assembly that when we come to the end of the question session today and consider the motion which is before us, there will be a proposal to ask three of your advisers to come and answer questions. Please could you accept that is what they propose to do.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I accept you are going to do it now. If I had been a Member of the Assembly I would have been demanding that they come here all through the last nine weeks.
Bob Blackman (AM): Mr Mayor, I think you should be clear that what this Assembly has done is to wait for the internal review to be conducted and for the LDA Board to have its meeting so that it could consider it. It has then demanded information. We got information two days ago in large boxes which the staff have had to undertake a review of – and done a first class job I have to say – in providing the detail for us. I do not care who you are, if you can speed read you would not be able to speed read this nearly 900-page document and get to a point to do exactly what you are asking us to do, which is to pose questions to the individuals who are quoted within some of this evidence, and we will do that. That is why I want to move on because we have confirmed certain aspects and I want to confirm some other things now before we move on.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I think it is absolutely admirable that you have waited for that report and all that detail. I think it is despicable that several of you have been on TV alleging corruption when you have not had the information. That would be valid if we hadn’t had Mr Barnes going on about a tide of corruption and smearing my staff. If you did not have the information why did he get up and make allegations of corruption? You are just saying you did not have the information enough to even ask the questions. That did not stop him smearing public servants who put London first.
Bob Blackman (AM): Can I continue with my questioning, because this is the aspect that I think is key. We were told by the Chief Executive of the LDA this morning that there is an unofficial, unwritten protocol that exists between your Mayoral advisers and the LDA about the
19 level of contact that should take place and is appropriate; namely to the Chief Executive or to the next layer of down, the heads of the various different units within the LDA. Is that your understanding of what the position is?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): No. I mentioned one earlier when John Ross got into massive levels of detail with quite low-level staff about recasting the entire London Tourism Board into Visit London. I am sure there have been many other occasions. Neale Coleman was crucial in driving through really detailed work about the Olympic site preparation.
Bob Blackman (AM): I can understand why Mayoral advisers would get involved in meetings and discussions and so on at detailed level. What I am talking about is direct contact on specific projects into the LDA by Mayoral advisers. We were told that there’s an unofficial protocol that has existed for 18 months. Are you saying that does not exist?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I am saying that there will be times -
Bob Blackman (AM): No, I want an answer; does it exist or doesn’t it? Yes or no?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I am not in a position to answer that but John Ross is if you want the answer.
Bob Blackman (AM): I am asking you because -
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I defer to John Ross to answer the question you have put to me.
Sally Hamwee (Chair): No. We will ask him the question in due course but the question that Bob Blackman is putting he is putting to you.
Bob Blackman (AM): I would like an answer; yes or no, Mr Mayor?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I am asking John.
Bob Blackman (AM): He can advise you but I am taking the answer from you.
Sally Hamwee (Chair): One moment. John may advise you but John is not answering questions from the Assembly.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Well I will go here, John can advise me and then I will tell you!
John Ross (Policy Director - Economic and Business Policy, GLA): [Off microphone] We deal with either senior directors or on particular topics we deal with people at a lower level, for example, on the International Convention Centre naturally I have to deal with somebody who is a specialist on the International Convention Centre. On dealing with our offices in China I deal with the people who deal with overseas things. I deal with senior staff or I deal with specialists on the topic concerned.
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Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I assume you do not want me to repeat what John just said; I assume you heard it.
Bob Blackman (AM): Can I also confirm then that when Mayoral advisers speak to LDA staff they speak absolutely with your authority as part of your administration?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): That is the only basis on which they are employed to operate.
Bob Blackman (AM): Therefore if Mayoral advisers – and these documents are littered with this – issue instructions to junior members of LDA staff, that comes, as far as you are concerned, with your authority?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): If any of my staff make a mistake, I am responsible. That is the chain of command.
Bob Blackman (AM): So the way that your administration works is, as far as you are concerned, the Mayoral advisers go in and tell junior LDA staff to do certain things regardless of what their line management is saying?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): No. I made it absolutely clear; Manny Lewis knows – and if junior staff did not know before now they certainly know after the debate we have had tonight – that, at the end of the day, my advisers cannot instruct them if they think that the advice they are getting would be the wrong course to take. If there was a conflict between a junior member of staff about the way to go on something with one of my advisers, their job is to pass it up to Manny Lewis who will then make a decision about whether or not to accede to the advice of my staff.
Bob Blackman (AM): So in that event if a Mayoral adviser did do that you would consider that to be inappropriate?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I do not believe that has happened.
John Ross (Policy Director - Economic and Business Policy, GLA): [off microphone] It’s explained many times to the staff in the LDA -
Sally Hamwee (Chair): I’m sorry. You’re not part of the meeting.
John Ross (Policy Director - Economic and Business Policy, GLA): [off microphone] I’m advising the Mayor, excuse me -
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I can’t answer the question until he gives me the advice.
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John Ross (Policy Director - Economic and Business Policy, GLA): [off microphone] It’s explained many times explicitly that nobody in the GLA, no Director, has the power to instruct a member of the staff of the LDA level and that is made explicit -
Sally Hamwee (Chair): I’m sorry; the assumption is being made that what John Ross is saying is being picked up by the mikes and is being recorded. That is not an invitation for John to come closer to a microphone. You asked - no, indeed, I wasn’t asked - I had an email telling me that you would be accompanied by John Ross and by Martin Clarke. I chose not to make an issue of it. I am happy for you to have your advisers but the questions, Mr Mayor - as I keep saying - are to you. Of course if you need to talk to your advisers here then that is fine. We can’t incorporate that into the record.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): If I had had written notice of about 25 questions I would have come with all these detailed answers. As I had no notice of any particular questions I occasionally will have to turn to my dear colleague, John, for a bit of guidance so I do not make a mistake.
Bob Blackman (AM): But, Mr Mayor, I am not talking necessarily here on the detail of this.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): You have the principle; it is pretty clear.
Bob Blackman (AM): The principle is quite clear. So, in other words, you would consider that if a Mayoral adviser gave instructions to junior members of staff, it would be inappropriate?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Absolutely, they are there to advise. That would be a robust debate. If, say, looking at the example of the threatened eviction of a black organisation, my staff say, “You really must not do that”, I would have thought it would be extremely unwise for a junior officer to proceed with an eviction without first getting clearance from Manny Lewis and it will go up the food chain. Any junior officer who was that stupid most probably would not last long.
Bob Blackman (AM): What we also have as a concern – and I raised this morning with Manny Lewis and I will raise it with you – is that clearly we are presented with evidence of emails, letters and other correspondence, memos and so on; what we do not have as clear evidence is of phone conversations or meetings which your advisers have, potentially with junior members of staff. The clear issue is what protection or otherwise do your Mayoral advisers take in recording notes of meetings or conversations that take place, particularly given the circumstances where they might be challenged to say, “Have you issued instructions or are you acting in an advisory capacity?”
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I think we have all in local government come across that time when a Chief Officer will say, “If you wish me to act in that way I will require written instruction” but that is a rare example where an officer is being told to do something they are unhappy with. What we operate here is not a vast bureaucracy of people. I know when I phone the Prime Minister or the Chancellor, there is a civil servant there making a note. We could do all that, and what would the staffing budget be?
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At the end of the day, I have always had the view that all this note taking, minutes and recording of phone calls is not to help the decision making process; it is to help the bureaucrat cover their back when something goes wrong. They say, “Oh, I’ve got a minute here from five years ago saying I was worried about this”. I do not minute my meetings with Manny Lewis or with the Commissioner of Transport. I do not minute them when I meet with the Commissioner of Police. They sit down, we discuss what the problems are, they go away and do it, I go away and deliver what I have promised to do and we come back and then proceed with the next business a month later. I am not interested in this place becoming a mountain of paperwork of notes of who said what to whom.
Bob Blackman (AM): Clearly the concern that we would all have is if someone from your Mayoral advisers phones up a relatively junior member of staff of the LDA, or potentially one of the other functional bodies, and says, “It is the Mayor’s view that you should be doing this”. You can understand that junior member of staff is likely to say, “I will jump to attention and do it because the Mayor has told me to do it”.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): No. If that junior member of staff is unhappy with what any of my advisers are saying their duty is to notify their superior officer who will take it to Manny or they will take it to Manny directly.
You would now love to have a transcript of every phone call and we could all pore over it – it would be another 900 or 1,000 pages of that – or you could replicate what we had at the Greater London Council (GLC) when we gave grants; we had 70 lawyers employed to monitor the grants. What we have gone for instead is a much smaller central core and we are now going to be in the situation where we will just randomly monitor to make sure things are going. We could replicate a vast bureaucracy of lawyers and accountants basically second guessing everything being done by any organisation getting their grant and bureaucrats recording phone calls. We would need to build another building the size of this to house the bureaucracy. If 10% of our grants were going wrong I would say that would be justified, but we are talking about under one tenth of one per cent.
We will soon be at the point where the cost of the endless numbers of investigations into these allegations in the Standard is going to outweigh the sum of money being investigated.
Bob Blackman (AM): Would you not accept, Mr Mayor, that there have been now nine particular organisations that were the subject of this particular review. Six referrals to the police as a result. That says there is something wrong, I think you would accept. Maybe not necessarily in terms of fraud and corruption within the LDA but certainly in terms of what is going on with these grants. We have had a detailed review of the six cultural projects and a second report by Deloitte that confirms that the project management was lacking within the LDA and confirms most of the original confirmations of concerns within Deloitte. Those are major projects encompassing £13 million worth of public money.
We have not gone into the details of all aspects of all the grants of the LDA, because clearly there are vast numbers and to get to the bottom of all of them would encompass enormous
23 amounts of time and money. What we have done is look at a sampling of some of these and what comes up is bad news. Now, from that perspective, that must give you cause for concern for how the LDA is managed?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): You have not looked at a sample. You have looked at the items that Brenda Stern [former LDA employee] brought to the attention of the Evening Standard. She, in a senior position, had access to all the data about all the grants inside the LDA. You have had access to the entire email record of Lee Jasper’s computer which was illegally broken into. What you have had drawn to your attention is that handful of grants out of eight years which have a question mark over them.
If you had taken any eight at random you would most probably have found nothing wrong with any of them. You have had your attention drawn, by disgruntled former employees, to anything they were unhappy with.
Bob Blackman (AM): Also, Mr Mayor, we have had as well a detailed forensic view of the cultural projects, as you know, and it has been confirmed that the LDA project management was lacking and many of the other aspects of criticism originally within the reports have also been confirmed, as a result of looking at all the documentation that the LDA was able to provide. Those are major projects. We did not even start looking at the smaller projects that fall within the cultural grants window; we looked at the major projects.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): This is the point Val [Shawcross] raised earlier. When the LDA was set up it absorbed a whole load of ongoing projects from English Partnerships. It was put together. It took quite a time to bed down. There were people there with a more traditional ‘Sir Humphrey’ style of working rather than delivering.
If you look at well-established cultural projects like the Opera House and the trouble they get into with a major expansion or renovation, here we were dealing with establishing, in Rich Mix, a cultural centre to serve the Bangladeshi community and the Bernie Grant Centre, in just about the most deprived area of Britain – not an area where you can wander down the street and get a local accountant or a lawyer or a successful local businessman to come on the Board – or the Stephen Lawrence Centre; all of these are difficult projects, helping to build, in the most deprived communities, the range of cultural offer that we take for granted amongst established middle class communities. They are bound to be difficult, but we have sorted them out.
You have heard from Manny Lewis about major changes made to make sure we get a better grip on these things, but I think virtually all of these were inherited. What I find bizarre when I look at the 42 page report into these cultural projects, is that graph at the end, the one which has the lowest, in terms of the information given up, rating, just 57%, is the Laban Centre which the whole world accepts has been one of the most striking successes that we have had in extending the cultural offer of London. People come from around the world to pay tribute to it. This is the one that they say has got the least documentation to sustain it.
Also, what is the point of asking accountants or lawyers to make evaluations about arts and culture? We are no more qualified to do that than they are. Our job, as a London
24 administration, is to make sure that all communities have access to culture that is relevant to them. How can you draw the relative value of the Opera House or the ballet with the Bernie Grant Centre or Laban? Our job is to make sure they are all there for all the community.
Bob Blackman (AM): Our job and our role is to examine what the projected outputs were, what the original idea behind the scheme was, whether that has been met or not and whether it is value for money or not. Clearly one of the issues about these projects that is identified within the reports is there were not proper evaluations about what the projects were aiming to achieve and therefore you cannot establish whether it is proper value for money or not in the monies given by the LDA --
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): There are two areas here. Is it being built properly? There you can get problems in the way the contracts are managed. That is an area where we can really bore down and build in improvements. The issue of should they be built is not one that can be determined by a group of accountants or lawyers sitting down and working out, “Should the Laban Centre be done?” or “Should the Bernie Grant Centre be done?” That has to be a political choice by elected people and you have to be answerable back to the electorate.
It is not like a business that is selling soap or something where you can work out whether or not it is successful. How will you ever judge the success of the Bernie Grant Centre? There will be thousands of young kids who might not have achieved what they will achieve but they will be taken up by the Bernie Grant Centre, they will spend some time there, they will move on, they will get access to qualifications. How will we ever judge the Rich Mix Centre? How, in actual fact, can you judge the value of the Royal Opera House? People who like opera love it, but is there an independent academic assessment about this? Nonsense.
Declare an interest!
Elizabeth Howlett (AM): I declare an interest!
Bob Blackman (AM): Finally from me, Mr Mayor, with the nine projects that we are talking about that were part of the internal review that is still ongoing on some of them, are you content then that the project management of those where the reviews have concluded is adequate and appropriate?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): No. I was profoundly unhappy with the project management of the Rich Mix Centre.
Bob Blackman (AM): No, sorry, I have moved back to the matters under the LDA’s nine reviews; Brixton Base etc.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): You have to make a choice. As I said, at the GLC we had 70 lawyers alone, let alone all the other staff, monitoring all the grants.
Bob Blackman (AM): I do not want to go back to the bad old days.
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Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): You tell me what you want.
Bob Blackman (AM): I just want to know whether you are content with the project management that has gone on on those specific projects and whether you think that it is fit for purpose?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I suspect if we were handling those today we would be doing a lot better than when we handled the Green Badge Taxi organisation in 2001/02. There has really been an improvement.
Bob Blackman (AM): The review process and the change process were implemented in 2005. The Brixton Base funding started in 2006. So it is reasonable for us to say that the project management of that operation should be under the existing guidance?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): It should.
Bob Blackman (AM): Therefore you are not happy that it is adequate at the moment? We have a position now – I want you to be clear on this – where project guidance is given on how things should be managed. It is not going right on a project that is implemented under that guidance. You say, “Well, it is clearly not going right”. Does not that give you cause for concern?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Absolutely. That is why, in the first instance, Lee got involved in trying to save it. When that was not working we stopped funding it and we sent in the auditors. Now we have pored all over that. 14% of the money they were given is unaccounted for and so we have asked the police to get involved. It does not mean to say necessarily it is been stolen; it might have just been badly managed.
Damian Hockney (AM): Mayor, you just said --
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Congratulations on your selection as candidate in May.
Damian Hockney (AM): That is very kind.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): What are you recommending for your second preferences?
Damian Hockney (AM): Mayor, let us stick to our sheet shall we? You say that you are not happy and it is all not going right. You say you also spoke to Manny Lewis.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Let me stop you. That is not what I just said. One or two individual grants have not delivered as they should and the mechanisms have been put in place to sort that out. I am incredibly happy with the work of the LDA. Remember what a lot of you were saying about would we ever assemble the Olympic site; all the jobs that would be lost; the black hole in the finances; the doom and gloom about all this is that the LDA deliver.
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Damian Hockney (AM): Well, there is a black hole in the finances. It has gone up from £2.35 billion to, what, £9 billion?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): And the Government is picking up the bill. Aren’t we lucky bunnies?
Damian Hockney (AM): And we taxpayers also in London. That £6 billion, 20% of that is also from the London tax payer.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): All the doom and gloom about Metronet; who picked up the bill yesterday? The Government.
Damian Hockney (AM): You said that you spoke to Manny Lewis after your BBC interview and at that point you discovered ongoing problems. Why then did you not immediately issue a correction to your remarks that there was a clear audit trail and that every penny was accounted for?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Because we did not know that. We sent in auditors.
Damian Hockney (AM): Then, in which case, surely that means that your remark was wrong on 5 December that there was a clear audit trail and that every penny was accounted for? That is what you said.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): The LDA has a clear audit trail about the money it gives to organisations. As soon as that breaks down they stop funding them. I suppose I could have called a press conference and gone on about the fact it is not clear and we have sent in auditors. I chose to wait until we got the auditor’s report.
Damian Hockney (AM): I appreciate your rabid dislike of the Standard probably motivates this, but you continued to accuse people of being racist, you continued to say it was politically motivated.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): They are.
Damian Hockney (AM): No, they are not racist. The fact of the matter is you continued saying that which is a negative against the people who are scrutinising you, but you failed to correct an earlier false statement.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): That was not the charge. You go back and look at how many days and days of full pages and banner headlines. What was the headline on the placards? “Mayor’s aide and missing millions”. Anyone walking by and looking at that would assume Lee was now in the Bahamas beyond the reach of the law living the life of Riley.
Damian Hockney (AM): Mayor, why did not you simply answer the questions?
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Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Let me tell you. You do not need to rush because you have got all the time you want now; there’s no cut off. If the Standard on that day had said, “There are half a dozen grants where they have failed to deliver what they want; there may have been incompetence, there may even have been some theft” no one could have denied that. That was absolutely possible. That is not what the Standard said. It implied theft by my senior staff.
Damian Hockney (AM): No, it did not. It did not imply theft.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): You had Richard Barnes saying “A tide of corruption at the Mayor’s door”. That is what I was denying.
Damian Hockney (AM): Mayor, you have been in public life for long enough to know that whichever side of the political divide you are on, you are going to see items with headlines that you do not like. You could very easily surely have dealt with this by just honestly answering the questions that the Standard put, but you have never answered, fully, the questions.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): We have. I said to Manny Lewis during that phone call, “I want you to look into all of this. I’m sure you will. Make sure there’s nothing in it”. They did their internal review assisted by their external auditors. They examined the 18 initial charges and smears of the Evening Standard and were able to dismiss 15. The others they could not dismiss because they could not get access to data, so they passed them to the police.
That is the climate we are involved in here; a witch hunt. Almost a lynching against Lee Jasper and a general smearing by the I that all these blacks have got hold of money and stolen it.
Damian Hockney (AM): That is a just sheer diversion. It is also an insult to black people who want things to be right. It is an insult to black and minority ethnic people who want things to be right. You mentioned Brenda Stern earlier on. If she was not being listened to internally when pointing out what she felt were instances of corruption, then surely she was justified in acting as a whistle blower?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): She was not a whistle blower. She did not go to Manny Lewis and say, “I’m unhappy with these grants”. She was involved in the whole winding up of them.
Damian Hockney (AM): She had brought up things internally. She did bring up things internally --
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): No. She never went to Manny Lewis and said she was concerned about any of this. She was not a whistle blower. A month after this was all over – the issue about Diversity [International] and so on – there were complaints by staff working under her about her contract and it was agreed she would go back to her original employer. The only issue about her claim of whistle blowing came long after the event. She was not removed because she was complaining about these grants; she was sent back because staff who worked under her accused her of threatening violence.
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Damian Hockney (AM): The problem is, from what I understand, she did try to bring these things up internally and that is when she was accused, that is when accusations were levelled against her. Again, this is a very political thing; somebody highlights something which is inconvenient and then the hierarchy goes into overdrive to rubbish that person.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): You know Manny; he used to primarily work for you as Head of Corporate Services here. He is absolutely dead straight. I cannot tell you the number of times I have had Manny in my office defending the Assembly from my trying to cut your budget or reduce your resources and so on. I have to say he does not feel you have looked after him since, frankly.
Damian Hockney (AM): Can you have confidence in any organisation which, over a period of six months, sanctioned payments of I think it was £480,000 to Brixton Base at a time when that organisation owed over £200,000 in rent to that same organisation between December 2006 and May 2007? One hand does not know what the other hand is doing.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I cannot believe that the individual handler of the grant was not aware of the rent situation.
Damian Hockney (AM): So they carried on paying sums like £107,000 --
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Let me pause for a moment so I can get --
Damian Hockney (AM): In a nutshell, Brixton Base received something like £490,000 between December 2006 and May 2007. In that period it owed to the LDA rent, and was subletting parts of the building to other organisations which themselves had LDA grants. Can you have confidence in that organisation, because I do not?
John Ross (Policy Director - Economic and Business Policy, GLA): [off microphone] Right. Out of £470,000 there was £68,000 outstanding. Obviously if the auditors thought there was something extremely irregular … they would have reported it.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): For those of you who did not hear that, John [Ross] points out the auditors went through this and, as I said, 86% of all the grant is accounted for, so it was not the huge figures you’re talking about.
Damian Hockney (AM): But why wasn’t the rent paid over nine months?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): There was a dispute about the rent, I think.
Damian Hockney (AM): No, not that tiny amount. If I was giving you a grant for £450,000 but you owed me rent of £250,000, wouldn’t that organisation have simply taken that rent out of the money I gave? That was part of the grant.
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Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): That would be the case if we were dealing no doubt with some well-established firm operating in a more traditional environment. That is not what they are dealing with in that situation. This is not a functioning firm making a profit; it is more like a charity operating in a social work field, frankly.
Damian Hockney (AM): But, Mayor, being given £480,000 -
Sally Hamwee (Chair): I think you have made the point, Damian.
Damian Hockney (AM): The Mayor is making the point to me that it is not relevant.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): 86% of that money is accounted for; there was a small amount unaccounted for, 14%, and that has now been referred to the police to look into. When you are in a situation where virtually nine tenths of the money is accounted for, you are not likely to say, “We’re going to stop the funding” until you think there is something seriously wrong.
Jennette Arnold (AM): Chair, I have a number of questions and we have loads of time, so don’t anybody over there worry!
Let me come in behind Damian because he clearly does not know what he is talking about. Mr Mayor, you will know that a substantial amount – and in this case this applied – of that grant was specifically for projects; it was not in this instance about the rent. Therefore that organisation could not – and you can see it there in standard practices within the regeneration world – deduct their rent because that would have been part of another agreement. Can you confirm and, if you cannot do that, can you send the information to Damian to bring him up to speed in terms of how these things are sorted.
Damian Hockney (AM): It is not in the documents.
Jennette Arnold (AM): Then you need information to show how the different proportions of grants are dealt with in an application to a regeneration Board. Do we need that information?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): It seems to me, because I do not want to get it wrong by a few thousand pounds or get the sequence of events out of order, that where you have had the auditors go into this in detail, these are questions you should directly put to the auditors who conducted the audit, because I will make a mistake. I am not an auditor. I have never been involved in organising something like Brixton Base. I can imagine that it is very difficult to manage; you are working in a very unusual environment.
Jennette Arnold (AM): That may be the problem here; that so few of us have any real experience of life! Let me go on and just say, also, that I am the Member here who represents the majority of BME communities in London. Again, can you just confirm – and the candidate over there made it political – what was the percentage vote that you got from the BME community the last time you were elected?
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Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I cannot remember off hand.
Darren Johnson (AM): Get John Ross to advise you!
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): He does not do the psephology. The reality though is I think my election was very much a statement by Londoners, black and white, about the cultural diversity of the city, about a desire to redress the imbalances in power and wealth. We have limited powers to do that.
I would not have the slightest hesitation in putting in place a project to build another Rich Mix or Bernie Grant Centre or Laban Centre and I am sure we will do more of that. We will do it better next time because we will not be taking over the projects after they have been started. The problem with the Rich Mix Centre was that the LDA was not project managing it. The lesson that came out of the Rich Mix Centre when we did a detailed investigation of that, long before the Assembly started taking this up, was two things; one that we should ensure that such an asset in future should always be one where, if the organisation fails, the building reverts to the ownership of the LDA. The second was that it should be project managed by people we appoint, not people appointed by the Board. Many of these organisations, as I said, are not laden with accountants and architects and developers; they will make mistakes. There will be a much more hands-on control of a project like Rich Mix in future. I think that was the weakness; we left it too much to the local community and the local council.
Jennette Arnold (AM): I am on record with my interest in the Stephen Lawrence Centre, having chaired it and now Deputy Chair. It is on record and everybody knows that. You were there this morning with me at the opening of that centre. Can you explain to us why, when the Stephen Lawrence Centre came through at the same time, had similar structure and that is clearly successful, the success of that project has never once been mentioned in terms of the work of the LDA?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I think what is even more important than that; the Stephen Lawrence Foundation was struggling. They brought in Sarah Ebanja to sort it out. Sarah Ebanja is now of course the Deputy Chief Executive of the LDA.
You have to have good quality people with some experience to manage it. This may be what eventually turns out to be the core of the problem with Brixton Base; not that there is great wrongdoing but they just did not have someone of the quality of Sarah Ebanja to drive that project through. The world is not littered with good project managers. Sarah Ebanja made certain and drove that forward, turned it round and it is now a brilliant success. That is why, when Sarah Ebanja sits there at my meetings with Manny Lewis and others and tells me she is confident a project is legitimate, I will trust her judgement.
Jennette Arnold (AM): It is that very lack of capacity in the community that a lot of the project funding is about. Do you think that that is one of the reasons that – we can ask him when he comes in front of us – Lee was the Patron of Brixton Base, that we have heard and kept his support throughout this relationship with that organisation, to give them that capacity
31 and to attract people from that community to work with that organisation so that they could get on with the work that we have heard from Val [Shawcross] that they do?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I have not the slightest doubt that Lee’s motivation in becoming a Patron of Brixton Base was to try to make certain that it survived, it functioned, it grew, it took kids off the streets, got kids away from gangs and gave kids the prospect of a life. Lee did not take a penny out of Brixton Base; no financial or pecuniary interest. He gave his time and the credit and kudos he brings because he is a very well respected figure in the local community and that is exactly his only motivation for being there.
I think what has come out of this debate is we have to be absolutely clear about the non- financial interests that either Members of the Assembly or key staff have. I am now, after all this, going to have to go back and look at the list of all those things I am patron of and wonder whether I should continue. If, say, one of those charities that I am a patron of goes belly up and someone steals the money, am I going to be accused; why didn’t I know about it? That is the danger in all of this; none of us will feel we can put our weight behind worthwhile projects for fear of the Evening Standard running a smear campaign if they go belly up.
Jennette Arnold (AM): Staying with Lee’s character that has just been disgracefully attacked for the last couple of months, as I understand it, Lee Jasper is involved in progressing your manifesto pledges with other agencies, and I will name a few; TfL, Metropolitan Police Service , Metropolitan Police Authority , the Criminal Justice System, the Home Office, the European Anti Racist Forum, government officers and politicians, senior civil servants from a number of world leading cities that your office is twinned with. Have any of these organisations raised with you concerns about Mr Jasper’s integrity, ability, style and commitment?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): No, they have not, but it would not matter. If I had any doubts, Lee would not be working for me. I think I said when I appointed Lee that if ever this city sunk back into the sort of problems we had 25 years ago of rioting, of a police officer being hacked to death and of a breakdown between police and the black community and I had to go into a riot situation I would want Lee by my side because he has got credibility, along with Bernie Grant and Diane Abbott more than any other black public and political figure in this city. He will make mistakes. He may occasionally push too hard. The reason he does it is because of the objective he wants to get to, which is not for himself. You look at the clothes he wears and look where he is still living; this is not someone who has been enriching themselves any more than I have.
The reality is the Standard knows it has no point in trying to run a campaign suggesting I am a crook; I have been around too long, people will not believe it, so they go for someone the general public does not know and try to smear them like they smeared Bob Kiley, who had the tragedy of a drink problem at the end of his career and like they have smeared Sir Ian Blair. It is this negative drip, drip, drip; this destructive hatred of people in public service. All those people could make more money if they just set out to enrich themselves in the private sector and they have not and that is what the [Daily] Mail cannot stand and its satellite paper.
Jennette Arnold (AM): Can I just say to you I will stand by your side but I do not do riots!
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You have been accused by Assembly Member Doocey of being selective about the use of information. Have you had the opportunity to read her press release of the second report that her [Economic Development, Culture, Sport and Tourism] Committee commissioned from Deloitte and what do you say about the level of hysteria and misinterpretation that she sent out there in the ether regarding the findings of that report?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I have said all along, Members here should have the right to any information that is not commercially confidential or about individuals. I think very often people assume there is some horrific killer document that could bring down the administration if only they could find it. You have to be precise and specific about what you want. An awful lot of the requests we have had lately, particularly from the media, have been fishing expeditions. We have 20 questions about virtually everything. At the end of the day that is information that costs money to accumulate.
When I looked into the work of the Committee, into these cultural organisations, I could not believe that there had been an instruction to the accountancy firm investigating these projects not to talk to the LDA. Can someone explain why, if you are investigating the LDA’s management of six projects, you instruct the firm of auditors that they cannot talk to the LDA, which is managing them? They wanted to and it looked to me like there was an attempt to get to a conclusion that people wanted. Then I read the report eventually, all 42 pages of it, and I thought, “Well, that’s all right then” and then I see Dee [Doocey] on TV going on as though this is the biggest catastrophe with public finances since John Major was running the country. There really is just no evidence to sustain the hysterical overreaction that passed for a press release.
I do think, “Why do you allow individual Chairs to do or say what they want like this?” You should get together and decide, “Is there any truth in this?” In the same way that Anthony Mayer can remove me from office if he thinks I am not fit to serve, perhaps he should have to agree all your press releases so they bear some relation to the facts.
Jennette Arnold (AM): Are you surprised that, contrary to this claim of fraudulent and criminal behaviour that this is supposed to be about, what Deloitte found was that there was a need for more work to be done in monitoring, evaluation and auditing of projects? This criticism is common to all regional development agencies across this country and this was work that was ongoing at the LDA because it is at about its fourth or fifth stage of review and change, because that is technically what an ‘audit circle’ is about. Would you agree with me that it was absolutely uncalled for, that press release that came out purporting to come from Assembly Members, when indeed it was merely the prejudice of the Chair of that Committee?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I am almost tempted to say we should print three million copies of this report for the Assembly and send them to every home in London with a copy of the press release and offer, say, a holiday for two in the Caribbean for anyone who can demonstrate any link between the report and the press release! I have to say, do not worry; 12 weeks from now it will all go back to normal, everyone will stop being hysterical, the smears
33 will stop and I should imagine as soon as the election is out the way, the Standard will be closed because it is losing £20 million a year.
Jennette Arnold (AM): I have two questions for you to confirm. If you give me a quick answer to the first, I can get the second question in! You have read the report. Would you agree with me that what they found was that the organisations, although there was need clearly about the capacity, about the fact that they were taken up before the LDA by English Partnerships and that the complexity of the partnership working is something that needs to be dealt with? What they have carried forward is a wider range of support and access to the arts, fashion and dance that young people from many communities in London would never have access to if there had not been the intervention coming out of your Mayoral pledges.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I can clearly remember, in the first couple of years I was Mayor, many meetings, some with the Arts Council for London staff and LDA officials, looking at these projects which we inherited. Many of them looked like they would never get off the ground. When people ask, “What’s the assessment that you make that determine these go ahead?”, it was me. I sat there; I discussed them with my staff and I discussed them with the Arts Council. We agreed to try to progress them. One of them we could not save, a black theatre project, but the others we pressed on and we delivered.
Had we had in place the sort of people we now have at the LDA, the structures we have and starting from scratch we would do it quicker, we would do it cheaper and so on. The choice was to let these go after, in some cases, vast sums of money had already been spent on them.
Therefore, when people say, “Who took the decision? What were the value judgements that led to Rich Mix and Bernie Grant going ahead?” my value judgements and my decisions and I am answerable to Londoners for them. Londoners know, if they vote for me again in 12 weeks, I will support similar sorts of projects across London.
Jennette Arnold (AM): Lastly, other than the shareholders of the Evening Standard – which a reporter told me that just making a reference to the Mayor on a billboard shifts millions of copies -
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Oh no, it doesn’t; they are down to 110,000 sales in London. Half their sales are now in the Home Counties where this sort of racism plays a lot better, of course.
Jennette Arnold (AM): Providing information for members of the BNP – two of the members who were in the Chamber earlier – really no one has benefited from the lies and innuendo fed and led by Members of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Assembly parties.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): When I opened the paper and saw that Richard Barnes had said there was a tide of corruption lapping at the office of the Mayor I thought shall I just reach for ‘Sue, Grabbit and Run’ and just sue him all the way to kingdom come. Then it occurred to me, actually, it would take 18 months before we got to court, I would most probably have to spend £50,000 in legal fees before we got to court, 18 months would go by and then
34 you are down to the vagaries of a jury of 12; whereas a jury of five million Londoners meeting in 12 weeks will decide what they think of the lies and distortions and the smearing of black individuals and black communities that we have had from the Standard and its associates over the last few weeks.
Dee Doocey (AM): I think you are confused.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Do I need this?
Dee Doocey (AM): I am very happy to talk you through it. I really do think you are confused. You said that we forbade Deloitte to speak to the LDA. That is simply not true.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I have a brief that says it is. I am happy to accept your assurances.
Dee Doocey (AM): Sorry, you have had your twittering on for 20 minutes; let me finish.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Hang on.
John Ross (Policy Director - Economic and Business Policy, GLA): [off microphone] The original report they were not allowed to talk to the LDA. The second one they were but it was claimed that the report said there were serious flaws…this was not in the Auditor’s report -
Dee Doocey (AM): This is ridiculous.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I was talking only about the first report. That is what my brief says. It is not about the second one.
Dee Doocey (AM): Shall we do something? I did not interrupt you and it would be helpful if you did not interrupt me and indeed if your coterie of whatever they are called -
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): It is only a coterie of two [referring to John Ross and Martin Clarke sitting behind him in an advisory capacity]. . Dee Doocey (AM): - did not do the same thing.
First of all we did not forbid Deloitte to speak to the LDA. The LDA made a specific request, which I think probably in my career is the most extraordinary request I have ever had. They actually asked if we would allow Deloitte, who were working for the London Assembly, for the Committee, to be based in their offices, to report to them and to allow them to have access to and input into the draft report that Deloitte was going to provide on our behalf before we saw it in draft. I said, “This is the most extraordinary thing I have ever heard and, no, you can’t”. I then suggested, in consultation with the Committee, that what we should do is we should allow any queries that they had, any queries at all, to go to the LDA via the officers and there was a very clear process written down and agreed to do that. It is simply not true to say we forbade them to talk to the LDA, so please get your facts right.
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The second thing is it is not politically motivated and the reason it is not politically motivated is that it was started in June 2006. It was started in June 2006 and if the LDA had cooperated, if they had given us the information when we asked for it in a timely fashion instead of, in the end, us having to summons some of it because they just would not give it to us, this would all have been over and done with by mid -
John Ross (Policy Director - Economic and Business Policy, GLA): [off microphone] I was just going to give the Mayor some information but finish your question and then I’ll -
Dee Doocey (AM): - this would have been done by mid-year last year. There is absolutely no way it would have had anything to do with the electoral cycle at all.
The next point I would like to raise; when we produced the report I said to Manny Lewis I did not want him to read about it in the press; I did not think that was the right way to behave; I thought it was much better if he came in and we talked to him because it was going to be critical. He came to my office and he was very open; we had a very good discussion and he followed that up with a letter in which he said on 18 October, “The Committee’s review of the LDA funding of cultural projects has been” - and I am quoting, “helpful in challenging us to again consider our own project appraisal, monitoring and control arrangements”. He also said, “In some instances Deloitte’s conclusions and the recommendations in the draft Committee report have prompted us to reconsider aspects of our improvement actions plans”. All perfectly good. He did not agree with all the report but he made those comments.
Quite amazingly, three weeks later he came, at our invitation, to the Committee – again quite unusual – and asked if he could make a statement. We were happy to agree. He said, “the report is flawed and I do not think that the conclusions you have drawn are legitimate”. The same conclusions that he had referred to as being helpful in helping him look and see if his processes were flawed.
You then followed that up a couple of days later at Mayor’s Question Time when you said, “They have found nothing of substance”. The first recommendation that was upheld says, and I quote, “It was not clear from the evidence provided what the finally agreed anticipated outputs are for the six projects and whether these were being monitored throughout project lifespans and whether the anticipated outputs had been realised”. There is a table at the back that shows how this works.
You then said – which is quite unforgivable – that the reason we had done this was, “It is just part of a continuing campaign against support for the LDA and the cultural sector”. Fair enough; that is nonsense. But then you went on to say, “and in particular to projects that support the ethnic minority communities”. Frankly, you do not believe that any more than anyone believes it and it is a disgrace for you to have said it.
As for Jennette’s [Arnold] comment about my “fraudulent and criminal behaviour”; that is beneath contempt. Absolutely beneath contempt.
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So don’t you agree that what you really ought to do is to apologise?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): No. I do not see anything unreasonable in one of our functional bodies that you want to dig into saying, “let’s have the investigating team here in the building” and get involved in it. Because we are all on the same side, supposedly.
Dee Doocey (AM): Why wouldn’t they give us the papers then?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): The truth is the Assembly has developed a reputation for being negative and hostile, not just to the LDA but throughout the administration. It is why you have lost the confidence of most of the senior officers here. It is because you have, over eight years, failed to develop a serious body of policy and define yourselves solely in opposition to what I am doing. You are always looking for evidence there is corruption and there must be something going wrong. Things which have huge popular support like the under-18 fares gets a sustained campaign suggesting terror we have not seen since Genghis Khan swept across the Old World is being played out on the buses. It is all doom and gloom and negative. You have your cheerleaders in the Evening Standard. That is the problem; you do not have the confidence of senior officers here that you put London’s interests against your own party interests.
Sally Hamwee (Chair): I hope, Mr Mayor, you enjoy re-reading some of those comments.
John Biggs (AM): I thought, before I asked a question, as a matter of housekeeping, the two officers next to Ken Livingstone have been described as, I think, his acolytes and although one of them, John Ross is an adviser, the other one, Martin Clarke, is the Head of Finance for the Greater London Authority and his reputation, I think, is unimpeachable. He is an officer who is as much an officer advising Assembly Members as he is the Mayor.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): And appointed by the Assembly.
John Biggs (AM): I want to put that straight because I think to try and stain lazily his reputation is not justified.
Perhaps that leads into my first question which is that there seems to be an extreme laziness in the way in which Members – perhaps through desperation or through ignorance or something – are leaping to conclusions without evidence behind them. The careless use of words, for example, as Mike Tuffrey said earlier that the police have been called in to the LDA six times. That is simply not true. They have not been called into the LDA. The LDA has referred matters of an accounting nature to the police in relation to projects and they are doing that for the reasons we have discussed at enormous length.
Similarly, the lazy language of Ms Doocey saying it is very clear that the LDA has mismanaged public funds. Again, I would argue there is no evidence of that. My colleague, Jennette Arnold, has covered this ground very adequately.
Can you speculate as to why they are doing this? Is it simply electoral stuff?
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Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Now let me think; what could it be!
John Biggs (AM): Let’s move on then.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Literally, how much of this do you think is going to go on after 1 May? It wasn’t anything like as bad as this. You have been wound up the Evening Standard. I understand that. You read the Evening Standard and you assume there must be some truth in it somewhere, but I can assure you there is loads of stuff in there with no truth in it whatsoever.
They are in a great panic. They weren’t last time but they realise now whoever is elected Mayor on 1 May will let the contract for the Metro. This is tens of millions of pounds of work to the Evening Standard. They believe all their propaganda that I am a malignant monster and they think I will somehow skew the contract so they do not get it. It is real rubbish. We will be bound by European procurement. That is the core of what is behind the Evening Standard; they think they will not get their Metro contract renewed if I am re-elected. That is what it is all about.
John Biggs (AM): I was heading towards a more substantive point! It worries me enormously if you watch, for example, the Dispatches programme, you would conclude from that that the Assembly was so feeble it might as well stay at home in bed all day because it has no power at all. Perhaps parts of it do; they are not all here this evening.
The reality I think is that the evidence I see of these spontaneous fabrications by Members of outrage without evidence really diminishes the reputation of the Assembly. An Assembly worth its weight would be able to hold you to account a lot more effectively than this one has managed to do. I almost look forward to having a different Mayor so I can beat the hell out of him, because I think this lot are not really up to it and it is quite an indictment of London’s government.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I have to say I have been disappointed by I suppose what we call the opposition. The Greens do a lot of work in the administration and have had huge impact in changing the pattern of spending.
If I think back to when I was a backbench member of the GLC; if someone had said to me, “You’ll be paid £50,000 a year to burrow in, to requisition papers and to be able to summon whoever you want” I would have made a name for myself all over London.
I have given you an undertaking. There is not a single member of my staff will not appear before you if you summon them to appear. You can summon them every week. I will give you any documents you require -
Dee Doocey (AM): But will the LDA?
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Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): - save only for ones that are confidential. When you put in a great big fishing expedition in the hope of finding some terrible corruption, it is not going to work. You have to know what you have to ask for. You have failed to be an effective scrutiny body and that is the reality of it.
I think it is clear, when you look at poor old Brian Paddick and poor old Boris Johnson; they get elected to stand for Mayor by their parties and they say, “Where are the policies?” and there are not any. Instead of building a Conservative and a Liberal Democrat policy for London you have spent eight years whining about what I am doing and nit picking. You have failed to deliver.
John Biggs (AM): I had two other tiny questions.
The first of my other questions is about Brixton Base. I think the coverage of this needs to be placed in a little bit of context which is that, as I understand it, the LDA – and this was before I became a Board Member of the LDA – promoted a policy of what are called Cultural Hubs and there were three such hubs; one was in Barking – which is not Brixton – another one was in Old Street – which is not Brixton – and the third one was in Brixton. What interests me about the coverage of this is that, for some reason, the media or the spin doctors have chosen the base in Brixton and they have delved endlessly into that. They have not looked at the problems which might have been experienced in the other places.
The reality is that each of those three bases has a glowing future ahead of it; the Brixton Base, Offley Works is going to be converted into work spaces for local community groups and local businesses. The one in Old Street has been converted into a training centre for the jewellery industry, which is a very important niche in London’s economy. The one in Barking is being refurbished as we speak for start-up space for cultural industries as well. We seem to have just focused on this one centre when there is a lot of success. Again, I think it illustrates to me the laziness of the Assembly at not looking in the round at the work that the LDA has been doing in developing parts of London’s economy in areas of some difficulty and providing some opportunities for young people. I think that is a point well worth making.
The question on the back of this is, would you agree with me – and this may sound a rather strange question but, in the light of history, I think you might find it is rather less strange than it seems – that there are extraordinary echoes behind this campaign and the campaign that a man called Lynton Crosby [election consultant for Conservative Mayoral Candidate, Boris Johnson] put together in Australia to achieve the fourth election victory of John Howard? Would you say that is a coincidence? In the case of Australia it was about stigmatising asylum seekers; in the case of London it is about trying to play a dog whistle game in politics and I think it is divisive, pernicious and damaging for the whole of London.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I think this is the core of what it is about. I would say to anyone who has any doubt, go and get the last nine or ten weeks of Evening Standard papers, go through and count the pictures of individuals and add up how many are black and how many are white in this scandal.
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Even when the Evening Standard digs into its files to find a picture of me, Lee Jasper and a police officer looking as though he is taking us away; when we get the Andrew Gilligan attack this week that anybody who is criticising Boris [Johnson] or supporting me is on the payroll; “all those black faces along there” as though the black community is bought and paid for for political purposes. That is an insult to a lot of black Tories and lot of black Liberal supporters.
This has been a racist smear campaign against Lee Jasper. It has been divisive and it fits in perfectly with Lynton Crosby; remember when they held a boat of refugees at sea so they could whip up hysteria about refugees? I have to say this is going to be a dirty, racist campaign. –
Andrew Gilligan challenges people to declare their interests; let’s remember, when Andrew Gilligan was forced to leave the Today programme because his dishonest reporting had led to the death of Dr David Kelly it was Boris Johnson who organised a dinner, “Save Andrew Gilligan”, Boris Johnson who gave him a job. Now you have Andrew Gilligan at the nexus of this vicious campaign working with the Standard to promote Boris Johnson. It is divisive for race relations. It is solely aimed at preventing a serious debate about the real issues facing London of transport and affordable housing and bringing down crime.
There’s been no substance because it has all been smear, smear, smear for nine weeks. I would love to be able to say to Londoners it will end soon, but my real worry is it is going to carry on. I will tell you the end result; people will not bother to vote. They will be so turned off by the vicious and unpleasant nature of the way this is being reported and you’ll end up with the British National Party BNP). They were here earlier. BNP elected because of the low turnout; that will be the legacy of this campaign.
John Biggs (AM): I will ask my final question which I think, with your judgement, Chair, strikes at the substance of today’s meeting which is, as has been said, we are in the eighth week I think of this campaign on these issues. My spies tell me that the motions this evening are going to try to stretch it out for another four weeks. Some of us would love to just get on to issues about what other parties are offering London so we can have a proper debate about the politics.
Would you agree with me that if people really want to stretch this out for another 12 weeks of nit picking, argumentative and negative campaigning, we are not going to do that ourselves? We are prepared to be open and to discuss with Londoners and try to bring the real issues out and we will beat them because their negativity will simply sink them into a wave of their own pointlessness.
Sally Hamwee (Chair): Can I just clarify, John, are you asking this as a Member of the Assembly?
John Biggs (AM): I am asking as a Member of the Assembly.
Sally Hamwee (Chair): I am not clear who the “we” is?
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John Biggs (AM): I happen to be a Labour Member of the Assembly. I happen to care a lot about this city. I believe that the majority of Members here actually do as well. I do not actually share the view of Ken that this is all about racism; I think it is just people are totally bloody unprincipled basically and are not bothered what they really do in order to try and create enough rumours of negativity that they think they might come in down the middle. I think it is as unprincipled as that, Chair.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Can I say I do not think any of this is particularly unprincipled. I have made a defence of the policies of my administration. At my provoking, you ended up with another hour and I think everyone has asked every question they wanted to ask.
Sally Hamwee (Chair): No.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I have given an undertaking that any of my staff will be back here tomorrow or any day next week to answer all this. I have expressed my amazement that after all of these nine weeks of hysteria in the media we still wait to see Lee Jasper brought before you to answer honestly your questions. Whilst it may have had some attraction with some people you will be glad to know my latest satisfaction rating in the opinion polls is still at 44%. I think most Londoners are just taking with a pinch of salt what they have seen so many times before from the Rothermere press going right back to the days when they supported Hitler in the 1930s.
Sally Hamwee (Chair): Mr Mayor, you have made your views about the Evening Standard, about Andrew Gilligan and so on clear.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Can we have another hour of this; I am enjoying it! Look, they want more. They want to do an hour’s broadcast.
Tony Arbour (AM): Mr Mayor, until we heard the last contribution I had thought that we did not only have a Mayor sitting in front of us but we had a saint as well, particularly as we were discussing his Archangel Lee, but I am afraid that you have demonstrated in your rabid response just now that really you seem to be paranoid about the press.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I might be paranoid but they are out to get me!
Tony Arbour (AM): So are we. I wonder if you could tell us please when you first knew that there were financial difficulties at the Brixton Base?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Certainly not when I visited it.
Tony Arbour (AM): When was that?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I’d have to go back and check. Actually the BBC might be able to tell you; when did I go?
Tim Donovan (BBC London): [from the public gallery] March, April.
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Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): March or April. It was performing very well indeed and was very impressive. I would suggest it is most probably best to ask Manny [Lewis] when he first brought it to my attention because I cannot honestly remember.
Tony Arbour (AM): Well, I have it chapter and verse when it was first brought to your -
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Oh good. Why ask the question if you already know the answer! You were hoping I was going to give a different answer, weren’t you?
Tony Arbour (AM): Indeed. Only an idiot asks questions if he does not know the answer to them in the first place.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): In that case why do I bother coming if you know the answers!
Tony Arbour (AM): I am not absolutely certain what you will say. You say the most extraordinary things and I have to say I am looking forward to you appearing at the Richmond Theatre, because pantomime season is still on and I think nobody will know the difference.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Do you think you will survive the Liberal Democrat challenge this time? Actually, I might have to endorse the Liberal Democrat candidate down there.
Tony Arbour (AM): Please do so; that will guarantee success! The LDA sent you various reports directed to the Mayor’s Office signed off by Andrew Travers at the beginning of November. There is correspondence, here in these voluminous files, dated 2 November saying that there had been ongoing discussions between Manny [Lewis] and the Mayor’s Office about the difficulties with Brixton Base.
The reason I am asking this question, knowing the answer beforehand, is if you knew all of these things, how on earth did you have the effrontery on 5 December to say that every penny had been accounted for when you knew perfectly well every penny had not been accounted for?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I can go back and give exactly the same answer I think I have given about three or four times already but why do not we just say it is written into the record? I might change my answer on something between meetings as I change my mind; I am unlikely to change my answer in the same meeting!
Tony Arbour (AM): It may have been that you thought you could pull the wool over our eyes as far as this is concerned. It may be of course, Mr Mayor, that it was not you who received these reports but it was your adviser, Lee Jasper, who received these reports. In effect Lee Jasper was being advised about matters that he knew about and indeed he created.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I would be quite happy to find out who received the reports and on what day if we can track that down and let you know. If you had have given
42 notice of that I would have come with that information but it is not the sort of data I carry in my head.
Tony Arbour (AM): I am afraid you really are avoiding the point. You told us – and you have defended it several times this evening – that your statement in early December that every penny had been accounted for. Someone in your office – and the correspondence was addressed to your office – knew that it was not so. What I am suggesting is that maybe Lee Jasper received all of this information and in effect was advising himself.
We have the documents here. You do not need your alter ego to tell you what is happening so far as this is concerned.
With regard to the performance of Lee Jasper and Brixton Base, do you think it is an appropriate thing for one of your advisers to present personally the accounts of an organisation which has received money from the LDA; for him to hand over those accounts to the LDA when the LDA asks for them?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): If you want I can dig in and find out the exact sequence of events.
Tony Arbour (AM): No, I am asking you, do you think it right that one of your advisers --
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I am not going to give you an answer about what I think is right until I see the facts of the case. Could I also make a suggestion, because you are so concerned about what I said to the BBC, that you ask Tim Donovan to download the entire interview, because what you saw was a clip. As I recall it is a fairly lengthy interview where the same question was put several times. I might be wrong. Rather than just take a clip that you saw, see the whole thing from start to finish; you might get a better handle on it.
Tony Arbour (AM): Do you think it will? I would like you to get the handle on this; we believe that you knew about the difficulties at Brixton Base, but almost your only good point is the loyalty to your old friends and your old colleagues and you were determined to protect your friend, Mr Jasper, so far as this was concerned and therefore you were willing to say anything so far as that was concerned.
We have here in these 800 pieces of paper lots of information about how Mr Jasper – who you have already told us when he speaks he speaks for you, when he interferes he interferes for you – dealt with a small matter – and you have admitted it is a small matter in the context of the whole of the LDA Budget – that this important person who was acting for you wanted to deal with this particular institution in which he had an interest. It may not have been a financial interest but he manifestly had an interest. Can that be right?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): If he’d had a financial interest it would not be right. He was the Patron of an organisation dealing with some of the most difficult and disadvantaged black kids in Brixton. He was there to help them. That is a completely different thing from, say, Conrad Black dipping his hand in the till for the Daily Telegraph.
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Tony Arbour (AM): I do not want to hear about Conrad Black.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): He is a big supporter of Boris [Johnson]. He will be sending him a cheque from prison.
Tony Arbour (AM): I want to hear about Lee Jasper, who receives his income from public funds, who really ought to be acting in the interests of the public, as indeed you ought to be, and you ought to be here seeking to uncover the actual facts. You have spent your time in dealing with this matter saying, “We can always summon Lee Jasper”. I have to say I am not absolutely convinced that we need to summon Lee Jasper, because you have consistently told us this evening that your advisers speak for you. Frankly, I would rather speak to the organ grinder; the man who is giving out instructions on these matters. You are the man who always tells us that you have all of the answers and indeed you have given us all of the answers but unfortunately they are the wrong answers which are not borne out by the facts here.
We have had, on the basis of these documents, one of your advisers interfering in an organisation which receives public funds which, on the face of it – and I say on the face of it because I am familiar with the laws of slander – has lost a great deal of that public money and your adviser knew it was losing that money and, by implication, so should you have done because all of the correspondence is here. Therefore I would like to ask you, when did you last discuss Brixton Base with Lee Jasper?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): The position is that 14% of that money is unaccounted for -
Tony Arbour (AM): When did you last discuss Brixton Base with Lee Jasper?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I have no recollection. I have discussed Brixton Base extensively with Lee Jasper since these smears appeared in the Evening Standard. I have not noted down what he said, I have not recorded it, I have listened to what he had to say about it but I am not keeping a track record of all of our conversations.
Tony Arbour (AM): Did you speak to him before these alleged – and I say alleged – smears started?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I am not aware that there was any point before the LDA sent in the auditors to examine the books where it had been raised with me that there was any problem. I am not even certain it was raised with me between that point and my phone call to Manny [Lewis] on the day that the smears appeared in the Standard.
Tony Arbour (AM): So you’re telling us that Lee Jasper, knowing that there were these problems -
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): No, I am not telling you that; I am telling you what I can recollect. Ask Lee Jasper to come and answer your questions. It is ridiculous. You are
44 asking me to try to remember what Lee Jasper did or did not say when you can have Lee Jasper here tomorrow.
Tony Arbour (AM): You are the man who remembers what happened before the war with the Rothermere papers! You’re the man who constantly refers to what happened.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I am going to issue a writ of libel against you because I was not born before the war, and you are smearing me on ageist grounds; I know it because I read it in books!
Tony Arbour (AM): I imagine that you read it in the Daily Mail!
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I do not think I have ever spent money buying a copy of the Daily Mail. I have occasionally picked it up off the floor of the Underground.
Tony Arbour (AM): You have constantly referred to these particular cases and suggested, as part of your paranoia, that it is a witch hunt by particular newspapers.
I wonder if you would tell us whether or not you think it is part of a witch hunt by the BBC who, in their extremely well balanced report on the Today programme this morning, talked about an organisation which had received very substantial funds from the LDA. When their alleged premises were visited there was no sign that these people were ever there. There was no evidence that any of the things that this organisation was supposed to have done had ever been done.
I have to tell you, Mr Mayor, this is very reminiscent, exactly reminiscent, of what happened at your time at the GLC. You funded an organisation at the GLC called The Kingston Women’s Centre which had no premises at all. A month after The Kingston Women’s Centre received their grant they received another grant to extend these non-existent premises. I have to say that history is repeating itself. You say to us that it will be a terrible thing if you had to have 70 lawyers here in the same way that you had to have 70 lawyers at the GLC crawling over the grant. Maybe if there were some proper protection for the rate payers of London against the LDA then we would all be very much better off?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Can I start by saying my recollection of the Kingston Women’s Centre in 1986 is fuzzy to say the least? On the account on the Today programme today I think we are talking about an organisation linked to Euronix, but it is the piece with the Martin Bright [Journalist from Channel 4 Dispatches programme] thing who visited several organisations, stood outside the door and says, “There’s nothing here”.
The fact that an organisation is closed now does not mean to say it did not deliver what it was paid to do before it closed. If you look at the allegations made; Music City, which Dispatches said was wound up after the LDA had given it a £40,000 grant, was taken over by Music Complex Limited which have continued to provide the local community and entrepreneurs with access to recording studios and equipment. Euronix which, once again, they stood outside and said, “It’s not here”. They were given £150,000. The LDA records show that the project
45 delivered its output. They stood outside Women’s Education in Building and said, “This has now closed” which is absolutely true. However, they fulfilled their obligations to the LDA and were paid the contracted sums.
I have been very rude about the Evening Standard. I have to say there has also been a problem with the way the Today programme has reported all of this. Once again, you are dealing with one reporter closely linked to Andrew Gilligan who has a deep grudge against me and my staff. because we exposed a wholly false -
Tony Arbour (AM): This is paranoia.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): No, you will recall the individual concerned ran a story saying that 40 black children in London had been murdered by black churches in satanic rituals. It ran on the Today programme. It was on the front page of the Standard. That is the reporter who has been behind all the anti-LDA stories on the Today programme. We investigated that with the police; it was demonstrated to be completely untrue, the Press Complaints Commission ruled it was untrue, but when we approached the Today programme and challenged them they refused to apologise. That is the reporter maliciously working with Andrew Gilligan because he was exposed and how strange -
Tony Arbour (AM): What complaints have you lodged with the BBC about this?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): -- this is the reporter who smears the black churches in London claiming 40 children they had murdered is now smearing black organisations who’ve had grants. That reporter’s a racist.
Tony Arbour (AM): No point in whinging to us about it. Why aren’t you going to the broadcasting standards people? Why aren’t you going to the BBC? You are just constantly saying that it is somebody else’s fault. You’ve just told us about these wonderful organisations -
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): We are referring the Dspatches programme to the Office of Communications (Ofcom) regulator and we will complain about the coverage of the Today programme and that one particular reporter’s work which has been completely unbalanced and biased to the BBC Board of Governors.
Tony Arbour (AM): I have to say that this smacks of pot calling the kettle black. It is an absolutely preposterous defence that you are offering.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): It is a preposterous situation where a reporter claims 40 black children have been murdered in this city and there is not a shred of evidence to support it. It creates a racist impression about our black churches and was a disgrace that the Today programme did not withdraw that when it was demonstrated to be untrue.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): It is enough to drive anybody to drink!
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Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I am down to the water! Can we have a break; I will pop upstairs and get a bottle for you!
Mike Tuffrey (AM): Can I invite you to do something that might impress Londoners as they come to consider whether to endure another four years of you in office and that is to accept some responsibility for the mess that is before us today instead of trying to smear and darken the name of others who are doing their job? I am going to take you through three or four items and invite you to accept responsibility for some things. Let’s see, for the first time in eight years, whether you will actually take responsibility for anything.
First, you accept that everything Lee Jasper does is with your full support and in your name in relation to this interference with the LDA’s procedures.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I do not believe he has been interfering; his job is there to provide advice and guidance.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): You said earlier that everything he did was in your name and with your authority and you took responsibility for it.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I take responsibility; I deny your claim of interference.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): That is fine. I now have found in the 893 pages the email I referred to earlier; I won’t name the junior officer because I do not think it is fair to name but it was to a junior estates officer – JO we shall call this person – and I will repeat it, “In relation to the matter below” – and this was all the property business with Brixton Base – “Can you put a stop to this process and call me immediately please”. That was from Lee Jasper to a junior LDA officer.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I think it is absolutely justified.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): When we pressed Manny [Lewis] on that this morning – and I now have an exact quote of what he said – what he said was, “I think it is not the way that an adviser should interact with the LDA. That is my view. That is my view”.
Manny Lewis said this morning that that was an improper way of carrying on and what should have happened is it should have been referred straight up to him at the highest level Actually what happened, four days later, page 433, the same junior officer, far from it going to Manny, “We have an issue over the occupation. This is a high profile pet project of Lee Jasper”. Far from it going upwards, what happens is they go, “Oh heck, we have to deal with that”.
Since Manny Lewis has told us this morning that Lee Jasper’s involvement at that point was not – and I quote – “the way that an adviser should interact” will you take responsibility for that, take that away and deal with that? Let’s just see if you can take responsibility for anything?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I am going to answer it in my own way. He could easily have got in touch with Manny. He was clearly trying to resolve it at a lower level. If the
47 officer was not happy they should have pushed it up to Manny to deal with. Lee was being vigorous; perhaps a smidgeon too vigorous, but what we had at stake here was an organisation we thought was doing really valuable work with some of the most excluded kids.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): So you will not take any responsibility? you won’t do anything about the fact -
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Excuse me. I take full responsibility for what is done in my name.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): What are you going to do about the fact that Manny Lewis, a few hours ago, told us that was not the way that your policy adviser should have behaved? What are you going to do about that?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): This is where we started out two hours ago. I am quite happy to say we need a code that defines exactly what – it is not necessarily for people at Manny’s level but for more junior staff down the bottom – the nature of my relationship with my advisers is, so that when there is a robust conversation they do not feel intimidated by that. Happy to do that.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): So you won’t take any responsibility for that instance?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I just did take responsibility for it.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): No, for dealing with that instance. That is what I was trying to get you to deal with.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): You asked me to take responsibility for it; I just took responsibility for it.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): No, you did not. You moved on to my second point -
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): You mean I anticipated your second point?
Mike Tuffrey (AM): - which was that the current procedures are defective. You will not deal with that instance; no action will be taken about that instance, but you have accepted that something needs to be done around guidance on junior officers, as you put it.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Yes. We were there two hours ago on that.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): I am now on my second point – will you take responsibility and agree with what the LDA has asked for? It has not asked for guidance around junior officers; what it has asked for are three specific things; clear guidance about the role of policy advisers, because the review that Andrew Travers did conclude, “The GLA has not, so far as the review has determined, provided any guidance to Policy Directors as to how the role should be executed in respect of GLA group members.”
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The LDA is asking for guidance about how Policy Officers should behave; number one. Second, it is asking for improvements in the Mayor’s Office oversight of LDA performance. Third, it is asking for a register of interests for senior staff members. Those are three specific requests from the LDA to here, not in relation to junior officers, but in relation to people who act entirely in your name. Will you accept that the current procedures are defective and need to be put right?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I think the one thing that has come out of this we all agree needs to be done is there needs to be a cross-GLA register of interests. I have not been aware – and I do not think Anthony [Mayer] was when we talked about this a couple of weeks ago – that the register of interests are just for each of the separate functional bodies and we have agreed there should be a cross-functional body common register of interests. I suspect we will need the agreement of the Assembly, but I think we are all signed up to that.
I am quite happy, as I said two hours ago, to make it absolutely clear what the nature of the relationship is, but we will draw on the White Paper and I quote it again, “Staff appointed to the Mayor’s Office will have direct day to day contact with those implementing the Mayor’s strategies and will speak for the Mayor on these issues”. That is the law and we will make it as clear as possible how it should operate, so we need a code; happy to have a code about how it should actually be implemented.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): The White Paper is not law; expressly it is not law. It is a step before law but you are now accepting that the way we have operated for the last eight years under your Mayoralty is improper declaration of interests of senior officers and lack of guidance over how they should operate. Do you also accept there needs to be improvement of the LDA performance oversight?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I am not agreeing with all that. We inherited a fairly dysfunctional body. We have got it operating very well. What has come out is that – and we were not aware there was not a common register of interests – it was an oversight by everybody. But the LDA has performed better and better with each passing year. I think the oversight is fine. We are happy to codify this so that more junior staff who do not get regular access to me or my senior officials will be clear about what the exact nature of the relationship is. I think this has been the most successful administration in the public sector for decades. You can see that when you look at the Audit Commission’s assessment of the performance of TfL; now the LDA’s performance registered as good. You see it in the credit rating that we have with the international money markets.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): Off you go off the subject. Can I ask you - what trying to do is -
John Ross (Policy Director - Economic and Business Policy, GLA): (several inaudible words) some information to the Mayor -
Mike Tuffrey (AM): No, please, thank you very much. I am asking the Mayor to take some responsibility for some things in relation to -
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Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I have taken responsibility all the way through; I do not know why you keep saying I have not.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): No, you are denying there is a problem. In relation to the defective procedures around the intervention of your Mayoral advisers, the only thing that I have heard you agree on is that there should have been a staff register operating for the last eight years and there was not and that is a very grave defect. I am glad you are accepting that that will now be put right. I hope you will accept that the other matters should be dealt with as the LDA Board has requested. On that one I do not judge you to have accepted responsibility except in a very partial way.
Can I ask you now about the third area and whether you will accept responsibility? Will you accept that you are being grossly misleading in describing the allegations that are made around funding arrangements as limited to a handful of projects that represents a fraction of the spending -
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): No, I will not.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): - given that we were told this morning what the LDA has now done is moved from the specific allegations, so concerned are they about what that shows and the questions that are being asked, to a systematic review of all their historic grant agreements which they are going to conduct on a sample basis across the whole board by involving DLA Piper, we were told this morning, who are lawyers, and forensic accountants. Will you accept now that the problem is bigger than an isolated handful of examples and that the LDA is proceeding to look at its entire programme?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): No. I completely reject that.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): So what Manny told us this morning was wrong?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): We have under one tenth of one per cent of the budget of the last eight years is currently under investigation.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): Not so.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I think it is a very good idea for Manny Lewis to decide to go over and look at everything, because that will demonstrate that these smears are unfounded. That is why we are doing it, not because there are other problems but because the Standard and you will carry on the smear and smear and smear all the way down to polling day.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): What he told us this morning – maybe you should seek advice before you, yet again, mislead Londoners – was they are now investigating the whole programme on a sample basis. That is what he told us this morning.
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Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): That is the best way of answering the lies and smears that we have.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): No, you just said they were not investigating.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I said they are.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): No, you said absolutely not and I am trying to get you to accept that this is not an issue around a limited number of projects that represents 0.05%, I think was Manny’s percentage, but is of sufficient seriousness that they are now investigating the entire funding programme on a sample basis using external lawyers and forensic accountants.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): We have under one tenth of one per cent of grants that look as though they need reinvestigation. Because of the hostile and poisonous climate engendered by the Evening Standard, we are going to dig in and investigate everything so we can demonstrate what a tissue of lies this has all been. What we will find at the end of all of this is not dozens and dozens of more organisations where the money has not been properly spent but we will be able to demonstrate what we have said all along; this is under one tenth of one per cent. You can only do that if you dig in and demonstrate it.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): We are back where we were in December, “There’s no question of anything other than this mere fraction; oh, but now we’re going to look at them to prove that there’s no fraction”!
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): This is the real problem -
Mike Tuffrey (AM): How can you possibly know that before the investigation has happened and, if the Board of the LDA was as sure as you are that there is nothing wrong, why is it now going to all the trouble of bringing in external lawyers and external accountants to review the entire programme?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): If this is the way you are going to approach it perhaps we shouldn’t. If you are going to say when an organisation says, “To demonstrate the probity of the way things are being run we’ll have that complete review” you automatically say, “It’s because there’s a lot more hidden away in there” frankly, perhaps, we will not bother then if that is what you want -
Mike Tuffrey (AM): I said no such thing. I have tried to be very careful. I have tried to get you to withdraw your case that this is an isolated incident and to recognise that the problem is big enough to -
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Then you are wasting your breath; it is an isolated incident.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): Then why are they now scrutinising and investigating their entire programme?
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Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Because they have to deal with poisonous people like you who may spread lies.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): I would love us to think that we had the power to do that. The reason the Board is doing that is because they have concerns, sufficient concerns, that need looking into. So that you will not accept responsibility for.
Can I ask you whether you will accept responsibility in any way for the behaviour of your Business Manager, Equalities who was, as I understand it, forced to resign when she was found to have been lying to someone in your office? Do you accept any responsibility for that?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): No, I do not; that is why she resigned. She made a complete error of judgement, she broke our code, she accepted a freebie and did not declare it and therefore she had to go.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): When you went on the record several times saying that there was absolutely no question of involvement of your office in Kamp Afrika, who gave you that information?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): That came from her because she denied the allegations and in the 30-odd years I have been in public life that is the first time someone working directly for me has lied to me. That is why she went the day we discovered it was a lie.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): You directly asked her and she directly told you? Is that what you’re saying?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): What?
Mike Tuffrey (AM): My question was who told you? On what basis did you issue that categorical denial? You’re saying it came from her?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): My staff sat down with her -
Mike Tuffrey (AM): Your staff, right.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): My senior policy advisers sat down with her and said there were allegations in the BBC that you went to this camp in Nigeria. She gave a categorical denial. They pushed her because the BBC was very insistent. They then reported that to me. That is why I answered the question from Tim Donovan at the press conference in the way I did.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): My question was who told you that?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): My senior staff.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): Yes, who?
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Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): It would have been I think Murziline Parchment [Director – Major Projects and Service Delivery], Redmond O’Neill and I think possibly John Ross? I cannot remember who was there.
John Ross (Policy Director - Economic and Business Policy, GLA): Two senior officers had investigated her separately last Wednesday -
Sally Hamwee (Chair): Sorry, Mr Ross. The question must be to the Mayor.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): If you need to seek advice please seek advice, but my question is who told you and on whose evidence did you rely when you issued that categorical denial? You’re now naming Murziline Parchment, Redmond O’Neill and John Ross.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): That is my recollection, but I would need to get detailed advice. I was briefed specifically by Murziline [Parchment] and I know there were other people present.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): So they were the ones who were lied to by her, is that the case?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Yes.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): Can you clear up one query for me; why Simon Fletcher is listed as her line manager on the GLA official records?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): He is Chief of Staff.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): No, it says he is her line manager.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I thought her line manager was Murziline Parchment.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): That is what I want clearing up.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): My understanding is she answers to Murziline Parchment who answers to Simon Fletcher.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): It says here that she reports directly to Simon Fletcher so we need some clarity there.
So it was Murziline [Parchment] then, as her line manager, who went to inquire -
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): That is my recollection but without Murziline [Parchment] here. I am only 99% certain.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): So this individual lied to Murziline [Parchment] -
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Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): And others; there were at least two, maybe three, of my senior staff questioned her, but I was not there so you need to ask them.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): What I do not understand is, according to the BBC – and I am only going on reports – there was at least one meeting involving the Equalities Business Manager and Lee Jasper with Kamp Afrika some months before.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Yes, Kamp Afrika had approached us to say, “We run this scheme, we take kids, put them in touch with their roots and so on” and they had asked to see Lee. I think Lee gave them half an hour somewhere in Clapham between meetings but we did not take it any further.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): So it was dropped dead after that meeting?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): It was not taken any further. I do not think we specifically rejected it for all time but Lee did not put in any work to working it up.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): This particular member of your key staff who sits on the eighth floor with you; is this your case – that she went off entirely freelance to have such discussions as presumably she had before this trip was organised, with no knowledge of your staff at all?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): You need to summon her as you can and put that specifically to her. I am relying on the advice I have been given by my key staff and we are now at several removes. I think it would be better if you went straight to the individuals concerned and ask them.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): That is why I was wanting it to be absolutely clear from you. I think, given the time, what would be helpful is to have a full account from your office as to who told what to whom at what point. We will then have the facts before us and then we can do our job properly. If you will agree to do that; that would be helpful.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): We will get that for you.
Darren Johnson (AM): This is not going to be too long but amidst all the hysteria there are some legitimate issues that have been raised of genuine concern, aren’t there?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): Undoubtedly. There is this absence of a GLA family- wide register of interests and I think that is a mistake and we need to put one in place. For junior officers, because we do get a lot of people come in who think it is just a big borough council and that there is somehow a mutual arrangement between the various parties, I think something that clarifies this will be very good.
Darren Johnson (AM): Also on the actual monitoring and project management of projects at the LDA as well.
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Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): The changes the LDA has made, arising out of the problems of delivering Rich Mix and others, I think would avoid these sorts of problems again in the future. A lot of these things were taken on very early on before we had the culture inside the LDA that we now have.
Darren Johnson (AM): Given that you acknowledge that there are some genuine problems and genuine issues that need to be addressed, is it appropriate to question the Assembly’s entire legitimacy in investigating this, in looking at this? Certain Members you may have problems with but I have not gone on TV to smear any LDA staff and I have not courted media publicity on this at all; it is not going to be featuring as a prominent part of my re-election campaign but there are some genuine issues here that need to be addressed.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): It is exactly the role the Assembly should have. That scrutiny is absolutely key to what to do. My complaint is there is not as much of it as there should be but an awful lot of people are part timers. All of my staff can be summoned. You can summon anybody with a contractual relationship. I am prepared to give you anything that I am legally entitled to do.
Sally Hamwee (Chair): Mr Mayor, this is getting extremely repetitive.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I do object when you have people like Richard Barnes saying, “There’s a tide of corruption” then admitting he is waiting for the information to support it.
Darren Johnson (AM): I know clearly you have a problem with individual Assembly Members and what they say and so on but every time the Assembly does investigate something you tend to imply that it is through malice and so on that it is investigating it; and, if it is not, then you are accusing it of being lazy and not doing its job properly. We do not seem to be able to win as an Assembly, as an institution, because whatever we do collectively you seem to be rubbishing it.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I think one of the problems in all of this is the desire that Assembly committees have to try to have a unanimous report. There are such divergent views here that I think that has been the core of why a lot of the reports do not get any traction with the wider public or the media; because they tend to be an amalgam of all the parties’ general complaints.
My approach in politics was every morning I got up out of bed, listened to the news, and heard what awful things – whichever government it was – was doing. I did not think, “That’s awful”; I thought. “What would I do instead?” I think the weakness of the Assembly is that broadly the reports tend to be – except things like the investigation of football clubs or the allotments or something when you are getting away from the internal squabbles here – an assemblage of complaints, rather than saying, “This is what the Mayor is doing; this is where it is wrong; this should be done instead”. If you came up with good ideas I would steal them immediately. It started with the first report on congestion charging where – whatever her name was; the one
55 who has gone off to be an MP – took completely contradictory complaints about the congestion charge and wrapped them all up in one report.
Sally Hamwee (Chair): Darren, I do not know whether you think this is an answer to your question.
Darren Johnson (AM): I am happy to wind up there.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I think we need another couple of hours to get to the bottom of this!
Valerie Shawcross (AM): Would you confirm that you have not been a Board Member of the LDA at any time and we have continuously had, I think, a Conservative Member on the Board - Andrew Pelling is it at the moment, previously it was Eric Ollerenshaw* and I think [former] Councillor Steve Hitchins represented the Liberal Democrats and did that work very thoroughly. Have any of those people ever raised concerns or fears about poor monitoring or management issues within the LDA?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): No. No one has come to me and said they have concerns. I am not surprised because their job is to try and finesse and improve the organisation bit by bit. I have to say I think Eric Ollerenshaw has been wholly honourable and decent in how he has conducted himself through this. We have not had Eric popping up and making outrageous statements on TV, nor have we from the Liberal Democrat representative, Mr Hitchins.
Valerie Shawcross (AM): Given that Mike Tuffrey, who I think is a very sensible and hardworking colleague outside of the three months approaching an election, chaired the Economic Development Scrutiny Committee of the Assembly for some several years, did he at any time raise any concerns with you about the monitoring or procedures of the LDA, given that it is within the brief of that Committee to do so?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): No, I have no recollection. Can I say as well, so we spread the guilt around all the parties, yesterday I met with the London Labour group of MPs and Kate Hoey raised the point about the Green Badge Taxi School. I pointed out to her if she had been concerned about this all she had to do was pick up the phone or write to me. It did strike me as absolutely bizarre that she gets into bed with Greg Hands – who is one of the most objectionable of the Conservative MPs in London – without having ever bothered to raise any concerns at any point over the last six years since the LDA stopped funding it. It is not just them; it is some of our own!
John Biggs (AM): I just wanted to help to do two things; one is to clarify a little bit of uncertainty and the second is to avoid yet another press release claiming that the entire LDA is being audited in some way. I will phrase this as a question to the Mayor, if that is what I need to do.
* Andrew Pelling AM was previously the Conservative Member on the LDA Board and Councillor Eric Ollerenshaw is currently on the Board
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Were you aware that the aforementioned Resources Risk and Audit Committee of the LDA has agreed to carry out a selective audit of projects, rather than the entire organisation and, just for the record, the report says, “It is proposed to check project life cycle compliance across a sample of projects selected using criteria such as the following: dormant companies or unregistered charities, organisations which closed within 12 months of funding being provided, companies which failed to register accounts with Companies House, organisations which failed to submit statements of grant expenditure, organisations appointed following single tender actions, other projects where any concern has arisen and an element of random sampling”.
That may sound a fairly draconian list but it is actually a relatively small number, potentially, of projects. The LDA has commissioned KPMG, I think it is, to put some specialist resource into help with that. The reason that has happened, just like any responsible Board, you would imagine, is when you have allegations about a particular named group of companies or organisations you say to yourself, “Is there a risk that there are others that we haven’t heard about which might have a similar problem?” Therefore you look at what criteria you might apply to examining whether there are other issues. I think that is good practice; it is good audit practice and it is good Board leadership practice.
I do not expect you – just as Val Shawcross does not expect you – to know all the minute details of the LDA Board; that is why there is an LDA Board, but, for the record, before people get carried away and say that the entire LDA is under some sort of forensic examination; that is not the case. You’re aware of that, are you?
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I would be quite happy for it to be the case, but it would of course be extremely expensive because I have no doubt, whether you have the selective investigation into what might be areas of weakness that you have outlined just then, or whether you did a complete review of all expenditure, what it will come back to is we will be talking about fractions of 1% where there may have been incompetence or may even have been some criminality, and there will be others that failed to achieve their objective, in exactly the same way that one firm in every ten in this city closes every year. If the market was perfect we would not need an LDA.
I have to say it puts it in a slightly less alarming context than dear Mr Tuffrey’s announcement.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): Just to be absolutely clear if I may because John [Biggs] is selectively quoting from documents that are not available to the Assembly that he has in his capacity as an LDA Board Member.
John Biggs (AM): You are quite right.
Mike Tuffrey (AM): I do not think that is very proper.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): I know you will accept his word.
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Mike Tuffrey (AM): I will accept that he read correctly part of the report. What we were told this morning – let’s be clear because everybody heard – that it was a systematic review of the entire historic grants programme conducted on a sample basis. What they are going to do is to lay out all the historic grants and then selectively dip in to see what they find on a sample basis. That is a rather fuller account of what is going on than John’s selective quote.
Sally Hamwee (Chair): We will have the transcripts of both meetings which show what Manny Lewis said.
Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London): We have had two investigations by the Chief Executive you appointed; we have had one by the Director of Finance that you have appointed. We have had two audit investigations into the cultural projects and we have had the LDA’s own internal investigation which has now been passed to the Audit Office. The Auditor has said he will conduct the investigation and pointed out this will be in addition to his annual fee. We have the references to the police that have been made. I will make a guess now and I would even be prepared to bet some of my own money; the total cost of these investigations is going to be more than the sums of money we eventually find have either been poorly spent or illegally dealt with in some way. That is the reality of it. It does bring some sense of proportion.
Sally Hamwee (Chair): I think we will all make our own judgements obviously. Thank you very much, Mr Mayor.
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