London Assembly Examine Boris's Promises

Rachel Holdsworth
By Rachel Holdsworth Last edited 168 months ago
London Assembly Examine Boris's Promises

Boris is getting it flung at him from all angles today. The Assembly's environment committee is calling for some detail, please, on how he intends the Waste Management Strategy to work (like who's going to pay for and run it) in order to meet ambitious targets like no waste to landfill by 2025.

Meanwhile, Labour, Lib Dem and Green AMs are joining up to bury the Mayor in a deluge of questions relating to his campaign pledges, as he reaches the halfway point of his tenure. 10,000 promised affordable homes have gone missing, for example, and despite avowals that the much vaunted cycle hire scheme wouldn't cost taxpayers a penny, City Hall estimates a £114m pricetag. (Incidentally, if you want to find your nearest cycle docking station, there's an app for that.) Then there's the London living wage, TfL ticket office hours reductions, no fewer press officers (though to be fair, Boris promised that cuts to the City Hall PR machine would be made to help fund rape crisis centres, and he finally came through on those).

Clearly a lot of this battering is in advance of the general election, taking Boris to task as the country's most prominent Tory. But while he clearly does need to pay a bit more attention to detail and a bit less to bumbling about fantasy airports, this looks more like national political point-scoring than the Assembly fulfilling its role of holding the Mayor to account.

Last Updated 17 March 2010