Mayor’s Question Time at the London Assembly. Always a bundle of fun. I am leading for the LibDem group with a question on Mayor Livingstone’s (lack of) success at getting money out of the government. In fact, the transport grant is going down – less money equals no successes by the Mayor!

Sods law (and probably no coincidence) in his update report to the Assembly Livingstone announces that the Government has decided to ‘allow’ prudential borrowing – and Ken’s application for £400m has been granted. Labour’s in a hole over transport and trying to dig itself out and through Ken a lifeline.

Obviously Labour’s polling is showing that people are fed up so suddenly – Bob’s your uncle, it’s OK to borrow.

I’ve long argued that the GLA should have the power to raise money through bonds (prudential borrowing isn’t quite that but is a form of it). Given how Gordon Brown has always firmly refused to allow this, I guess it is a sign of Labour’s political troubles that he’s finally had to relent a bit.

Of course, this totally undermined the thrust of my questionning – but a quick bit of thinking and I ran through the above with the Mayor and reminded him that it was now even more important to make the case for London as the Government in future could simply say – “well you can borrow” and reduce what should rightly be paid for by the Government still further.

I then drifted onto the Mayor’s £350million underspend on the tube. I think Ken is misleading the Assembly and I am trying to flush him out on what this is really about. He keeps saying ‘it isn’t me who is underspending, it’s just that the private companies haven’t sent in all their bills’.

Not so – there are no bills due. In fact, the service charge on the PPP money is always up front – so that’s a bit of a porky.

Ken slithers around on this one – but basically admits that I am right about the money being up front. So I ask him to publish a list of the projects he thinks are in the pipeline and will have to be paid for with price-tag and time-line. He wriggles into ‘commercial confidentiality’ as a get out of this.

But it’s not over yet – my allotted time for questionning runs out (and we have a very rigorous Assembly Chair who is a stickler for timings). But I’ll be back!

During question time a group of young people from the Haringey Youth Forum are present to see how London is run. Afterwards I go to Committee Room 9 where the youngsters are having sandwiches and take questions from them. Bright kids, bright questions.