Speeches by Fortune.

“I will go and look those up then; that is my interest. My question was actually for Mr Foster and it is about the decommissioning of the sites in phase 2. Can you just give us an update on that, please?”

“I think the original plan was to be completed in 2027. Is that right?”

“At an estimated cost of about £100 million. Has anything changed?”

“This is a very quick question. This is London-centric. Mark may remember when I was chairman of the London budget scrutiny committee, so some of this déjà vu. In terms of the development of the Euston site, have there been any conversations with the mayor about setting that up as an MDC?”

“We are up to $150,000 already.”

“ I have never heard “additive” before. I am going to take that away and use that one.”

“ Some are external, but some are internal, so the 5,000 figure is not new staff.”

“ That will still leave about 4,500 to find. When will they be ready and where are they coming from? Where are you finding that level of staff? Is it all new staff or is it redeployments?”

“ So it is a multi-year project.”

“ Sir Jim, you mentioned the investment to raise another £6.5 billion. There is an investment of £1.4 billion in new staff, with 5,000 coming on stream, 200 of whom were due to start in November.”

“I will just follow up on some of those figures and I am looking forward to when you release the figures about productivity. You think that is imminent, do you? I think you said you were giving them to the board next week.”

“Sorry—what will be done differently now from what was happening in 2019?”

“What was that figure again on patients? Sorry—I missed that.”

“I appreciate that it is very difficult, because of covid over the last few years, to assess these things linearly. I went back to an IFS report from November 2023 that looked at staffing versus treatment volumes; it compares 2019 with 2023, so I hope it misses the sort of heat of covid. The comparison from then to now …”

“I have an interest in local government, but I am not a councillor.”

“An increasing amount of Transport for London’s funding comes from punitive taxes on motorists, including those in my constituency of Bromley and Biggin Hill. There are reports that the Mayor of London was actively planning to charge drivers up to 60p a mile to drive. Will the Secretary of State take the opportunity to …”

“That is going to hit my local authority by probably about half a million quid, I would have thought, in terms of what it can do.”

“How imminent, would you say?”

“Is the thinking currently that, were it to continue, it would still go directly to the local authorities, which is where I think it is better used, rather than going to TfL?”

“Previously, what was happening with that allocation in London—I am a London MP—is that 95% to 96% of that money was going directly to local authorities as opposed to TfL.”