Thank you very much for the work on this brilliant report. It's a great name that hits the nail on the head of the two big tasks we have to achieve in our city: getting London going again after a decade of not moving as fast as we should; and repairing our city so we can deliver on the climate emergency agenda. 
 
That's so important for the future of our children and our planet. For me, thinking of my perspective as a council leader in my borough with my role in central London, I'm thinking about a whole city. The approach set out in this report, which talks about partnerships and place and communities, is fundamental. And I'll come back to that. I want to start by saying about the challenges that we face here in London. 
 
I'm sure you all know it's been a really hard decade and a half for our city. We just escaped the cloud of everything being about everyone but London. I didn't grow up in London. I grew up in the Northeast of England. I am delighted that the country is talking about growth and prosperity across the whole of the country. 
 
But that can't be at the exclusion of our city. We know London has one of the highest levels of poverty in the country. We know London has, yes, great wealth, but also millions of people struggling to get by. 1 in 10 residents in our city are struggling to pay their bills, up from 12 to 18% of people struggling to make their finances work at the end of the month. It's a huge challenge.  
 
We also know we've had a decade where three big things haven't happened in the way that they have been happening previously. Growth has been there, but it's been slower than it was. Productivity has absolutely flatlined and as a result, people's living standards have gone down. Those last two things are almost unprecedented. 
 
You have to go back to the Napoleonic Wars to get a period where we've had such poor productivity. The Napoleonic Wars, it's a crazy length of time, but there's no reason why it has to be that way. And when you think about the things that this report talks about, about the change that we need to deliver in London, we're past masters at it. 
 
You think about the things that we fundamentally changed leading the world on: sanitation, bringing in cars and rail and phone lines and the internet without it really even disturbing anyone's life. We just sort of got on with it, despite the fact that we live in this historical city, with this complex range of buildings and roads and networks and communities. 
 
So, I'm hugely optimistic that we can rise to the challenge again. Now, I'm very glad we've got a government that thinks London is part of the answer, not some way to look down on. So, what are the answers are set out here? Well, we're working hard as a city now, aren't we, to develop a new Growth Plan for London that is fundamental to the change, we need to deliver. And yes, that's about growing the big sectors that can deliver that boost in productivity, that boost in growth, and whether that be our green economy, our life sciences, our visitor economy.  
 
But it's also about making sure that we create the foundations in London for people to be able to get on in life. Our big challenges right now are about people leaving London and not coming here, about being a city where people struggle to make ends meet. 
 
In my borough, we're seeing our primary schools empty out because so many people are making the decision that actually it's just a bit too expensive to bring up your children here. And a bit too hard. We need to turn that around. And so again, the report sets out here the importance of delivering homes, homes that people can afford, infrastructure that changes communities’ lives, not just nice shiny towers with nice glass on the outside is fundamental. 
 
And we only do that if we work together. And that's what I've been doing in my borough. That's what councils across the city are doing. So, I want to talk through some examples of that kind of work. So let me start with the easy big obvious ones. In fact, down here on the map you can see where all this I'm about to talk about would be. 
 
So, delivering new transport infrastructure we know delivers all sorts of prosperity for our city. Anyone who's been on the Elizabeth line knows how much it's transformed transport in our city, but it's also delivered growth. It's also delivered homes. London needs the next wave of that kind of investment. The Bakerloo line extension, which is on the map over there, that's the brown. 
 
But it won't be above ground as it seems to be here It's not an elevated train line. It's a brilliant example of the next wave of big infrastructure that we need. And that's because, yes, it will deliver a huge transformation in transport, connecting a bit of London out into the southeast, that has been historically underserved. 
 
But even more importantly, it will deliver 20,000 homes, a £1.5 billion increase in GVA, long term growth, not just for London, but for our whole national economy. That's the kind of project we need to deliver. And the partnerships that sit behind that are very real just to bring that to life.  
 
I'll talk briefly about Elephant and Castle Station. So right now we've already started building the first new ticket hall for that line. That's on a site where we're also building a brand new site for the London College of Communications. We're also building homes and a new town centre and shops. It's a project that's a partnership between the council, the developer, the university, the Mayor of London who's funded a chunk of it, and Transport for London. 
 
It's been complicated. And when I went down there a few months ago and stood at the bottom of the hole that's been dug and looked up at the engineering, it blows my mind that you can actually organise all of those things in one go and deliver on site. I suspect some of you were involved in this work. I don't know how you do it. 
 
But that's a real partnership. Using different bits of land, different bits of assets between the public and the private. And we need more of that work across our city. Not just there, but for the West London orbital, for extending the DLR, for making sure we have those big transport projects that we know drive growth and that we know deliver a more sustainable city. 
 
At the other end of the spectrum, we need to really think and deliver on how we work in individual neighbourhoods for communities. The work that London Councils is doing with 3Ci to look at a net zero neighbourhoods model is pushing the boundaries and what that looks like; looking at taking a series of neighbourhoods around our city and upgrading the energy infrastructure, the installation infrastructure of the whole neighbourhood, every home to school, the local community facilities in one go, and again bringing in a blend of public finance and private finance to make that happen. 
 
We've got to think in that holistic way. And why that one, I think, is so exciting is because we know full well that if we leave behind those who are not drawing down the grant from government to do it at their home, you will have a whole set of people who are left behind in the energy change that we're delivering in our city, and overwhelmingly, that will be people who've got the least agency in their life and at least able to take hold of those opportunities. 
 
We're also looking at the regional, subregional level on the planning work we can do together. The work we're doing on local energy area planning in west London, with the aim of rolling out the same approach across the whole of the city, is looking at exactly that right now. As I can expect, many of you in this room will be involved in development. 
 
The delivery of homes and jobs in west London is being held back because there simply isn't the energy infrastructure in the grid. And that's complicated to answer because yes, UKPower have got their role, but also landowners have got their role, local authorities have got their role. TfL, many of us. So doing local energy planning to look at how we find the right supply of energy on a subregional basis takes us back to the focus in here on partnerships and place and the needs of different communities around our city. 
 
There is so much more that we can do to deliver on that approach. District heating is another fantastic example. London kind of left the world on district heating. If you go back to the 50s and 60s, we were building these fantastic, at the time, cutting edge systems that were providing cheap, low cost, reliable energy for large numbers of people as part of huge civic projects with great pride. 
 
And actually, when I go and visit those that I have in my boroughs - I've got over 160 district heating, systems in my council housing stock - they're incredible bits of engineering. You go inside, they look much more like a full-scale energy generation plant than they do like something that might be at the back of a council estate. 
 
But we've fallen way behind. And you'll know that you go to Denmark, you go to Sweden, and you will see energy infrastructure district heating down on a whole different scale. Whole cities planned around it. And we need to move back to doing that. And again, the heat networks work that we're doing through London Councils is starting to move our whole way of thinking, not just doing, but thinking back to how can we plan energy in a different way. 
 
And we'll move this into a space where you can then begin to tap into the amazing assets of heat that we have around our city. Heat that's under the ground, heat that's in the river, heat that's in the tubes, tube stations, which you all know still overheat in the middle of December and January. That's work that we can do through partnership and through thinking big whilst being very practical. 
 
Behind all of that for me is the fundamental need, as this report again talks about, to rediscover our civic pride. It's not that we don't have it in London, we have lots, but it's not where it once was. The idea that we can deliver things together at huge scale, whole council estates, power stations within the city to drive the need of our community. 
 
Those things feel very distant, don't they? Right now, we've got to get back to doing things at that scale. And to be honest, yes, there are problems about the money and yes, finding the investment is hard, but in many ways, the thing that we've just got to rediscover is the belief that we can do it, and to build on the fact that we know we can. 
 
Again, I go back. The Elizabeth line may have been a little late, but it's an amazing piece of infrastructure, right? It's world leading. It's transformed the usage of rail across the country. That's something that we've delivered here in the city. We could, of course, be doing that for energy generation. We can of course be doing that for homes. 
 
So, I guess I'd say to all of you in this room, in the roles that you fill. Thank you for having the chance to talk with you this evening. Let's think big. Let's think about how we rediscover that civic pride, and that we deliver those projects that really change lives. And yes, let's do that in a way that creates growth in our city and creates more jobs and builds more homes. 

But more than anything else, let's make sure that when we're doing that work, we really deliver the important things, the prosperity for people who are struggling to get by right now. The end to our carbon emissions that secure the future of our children and our grandchildren. And let us seize the opportunity of having a government that wants to work with us, that was talkingabout it over at the Guildhall that shares those ambitions with their six missions that link so closely to the goals that Londoners have for their lives.