 Well, thank you very much indeed, Craig. It's great to be here and thank you for the opportunity to join you today. It's great to be at an event that the LSE is hosting and as one would expect with the only event with the LSE involved, I've already been listening to a lot of rigorous discussion and analysis of policy options. But I think what we're also doing today is celebrating urbanism and celebrating what cities contribute to the world. They are drivers of innovation which, as Craig rightly said, is one of my crucial ministerial responsibilities. They're also drivers of creativity and that's why it's so right to be holding this event in one of London's great creative districts. It was that kind of celebration that came across very vividly in the Prime Minister's speech because tech city itself is a great example of that. Now, what can we in Britain and in London in particular offer to what is now a global debate? Well, we were, of course, the first country to urbanise. We were the first country to go through that crucial benchmark where more than 50% of our population lived in cities. We went through that according to the census in the 1850s. That's when more than half of England's population was living in cities and that very same crucial hurdle of more than half of your population living in cities was passed by the world as a whole in 2008. And it does profoundly change the character of a society once it is urbanised on that scale. Of course, when we did it, the population of England in the 1850s was about 20 million. China is doing it with a population of 1.3 billion. So the challenges are on a different scale. But we find that there is continuing international interest in British expertise and engagement with urbanism. And cities are the places where a lot of the economic growth and the innovation happens. 80% of global GDP is generated in cities. 60% is generated in the world's top 600 cities. Though, of course, of those top 600 cities, at the moment it's the 380 that are in the major cities of the developed world that are generating 50% of global GDP. It's the other 220 cities of the developing world who are currently only generating 10% of world GDP. The shift in the balance between East and West, between conventional advanced economies and developing economies, the shift in the balance of urbanism over the next 20 years is going to be one of the crucial changes facing the world. Cities don't just generate growth in the high tech and that's going to talk about in a moment. I buy the argument that if we go right back to the origins of urban living right back into prehistory, it wasn't that advances in agriculture were made urban living possible. It was also humans coming together in greater concentrations that drove the need for more domestication of animals and more agriculture. The development of agriculture and urbanism went together. If I can just report, because one of the fascinations of my job is seeing all these extraordinary research projects going on around the country, led by scientists and researchers and sponsored by our research councils, I think of going to a BBSRC research centre in Yorkshire only a few months ago to see what might be the future of city agriculture. In the past, one of the problems with intense agriculture in warehouses was that conventional old fashioned electric lighting, the bulbs generated so much heat that the distances, the spaces that were required were too great. Now with modern LED bulbs, that is not a problem. So we've got teams of researchers that are working out the exact correct combinations of LED lighting in order to ensure that your broccoli or your tomatoes or your raspberries will grow most rapidly in neat ranks, only about a metre, just over a metre apart, and the absolutely clear objective is in future there will be a warehouse around the back of your urban Tescos where they will be growing a large proportion of the green produce that people get about. There are innovations and research underway in leading British research institutes to make that kind of thing happen. Well, as well as that agriculture, there are of course a lot of more other areas of technological advance linked with the rise of urbanism. We need intelligent traffic management systems to avoid gridlock, something that was being touched on in the discussion when I arrived. We need sophisticated energy markets, again something that was being touched on in the earlier discussion. Cities are intense users of energy and one of the areas again where we're leading the research agenda is to try to find smart ways of reducing energy demand. High performance IT has itself become a major user of energy every time we're on Facebook it consumes roughly the same amount of electricity as boiling a kettle. We have people who are locating their large IT data handling capabilities in places like northern Sweden to try to lower on cooling costs. Although other countries are the leaders in high performance computing, we are the leaders in energy efficient high performance computing which is exactly the type of computing you want if you're going to have intense data centers located in urban areas. We're world leaders in energy efficient computing because we write very smart algorithms which mean you require fewer calculations and fewer individual processes in order to generate a particular output from your IT system. So we look forward to the day when the IT computer load on our energy systems is reduced by sophistication in skill in the way in which the programs are written. As well as those type of developments, let me briefly review some of the commercial and policy initiatives that we're taking. We've obviously got the advantage of a range of firms with real expertise as providers of solutions, whether in specific vertical sectors such as traffic management or water management or in the design and management of large scale projects that you need in order to develop future cities. And I know that many such firms are represented here today and perhaps some of the firms that aren't here today are instead participating in the current UKTI sponsored ministerial mission to Singapore, Malaysia and Philippines which is there specifically to explore opportunities for UK businesses in future cities in Asia right now. So we've already identified this as a priority for UKTI and trade attention. We've also launched our program of city deals. I found one of the good working rules for urbanism is there's usually someone called Greg Clarke involved and my ministerial colleague, the ministerial Greg Clarke has driven that agenda and we're making great progress in deals which provide much greater autonomy to leading cities outside London, Birmingham, Manchester than they've enjoyed for many decades. Many of you will be aware also of the future cities demonstrator competition which the TSB launched earlier this year worth £25 million. Some 30 cities were successful with feasibility studies and now the short list of four cities is being carefully studied to determine which city will be funded and the final winner will be announced in January. As well as that alongside that demonstrator, the TSB of course is also establishing the future cities catapult which will have a player crucial role. It will be different from some of the other catapult centres, the technology innovation centres. It won't simply look at technologies to support cities. Future cities, important though that is, it will also look at issues such as citizen behaviour and the financing of new business models, exactly the type of cross-disciplinary approach that you're taking at this important conference today. And actually some of the other catapults we've got such as connected digital economy, transport will also have a role to play in enhancing our capability in urbanism. And then of course as well as that within the framework of the industrial strategy we have specifically got the information economy, a strand which I will be leading as the minister responsible and we see future cities as very much playing into that. So if you look at that range of policy activity you can see that alongside the agenda of the mayor alongside the Prime Minister's powerful speech about tech city we're also trying to use our research strengths and the commitments of the TSB and the activities of the UKTI to grow and take international our expertise and capabilities in this area. I very much look forward to your comments and questions. Thank you very much indeed. Minister has time for a few questions from us and we invite people in the audience. There are people out with yellow scarves and roving microphones if you have a question. Raise your hand. Well what we plan to do is to launch our catapult in the new year. The TSB are in the lead. I can't really add much at the moment other than to say that it is a shared resource. It will be particularly we think of help to SMEs and startups who don't individually have the capability to study transport systems energy patterns but have ideas that they may have a specific project that is relevant. They will find at the catapult centre experts who have already got the basic modelling and the basic understanding of those so that their particular projects and programs can be slotted in. But the detail will be launched by the TSB in the new year. Well that's a very good question. Although there aren't any proposals on changing political or institutional arrangements when I looked at it first of all from my perspective what I see is London as a centre for higher education, in fact education more generally and several of our leading universities basically running out of space. I don't know how the LSE is doing on its campus but there's a very interesting trend developing. There is UCL moving to have a second campus east on the old Carpenters estate alongside the Olympic Park and separately you've got Imperial moving west with its second campus out in Hammersmith Shepherds Bush. You put all that together and you stock and you then have a kind of connection out from Imperial out to Oxford and then up from UCL via King's Cross up to Cambridge. You see a kind of arc of activity. Something that I'm very keen to do is to leverage further the capabilities of research activity. Only last week I announced that we would be looking for a different model for the National Physical Laboratory out at Teddington which is a potentially very valuable and important campus that I'd like to see a more heavily used research centre for London. We thought that it needed a different model than CERCO's management. They've done it very efficiently but they've essentially been managers and we're looking for a joint venture now between government and external partners that could be other universities, could be international universities to help us grow and develop that site including of course but protecting it as a global centre of expertise in metrology. That's before we move on to other investments such as the investment which the Chancellor announced yesterday of a guarantee for £1 billion of funding to take the northern line out across to Battersea and the enormous development that is happening there. So yes we are, although of course there are exciting things happening to the east, if you put together just what I've been able briefly to list, Battersea, Teddington, Imperial West, there is also a lot of activity out west as well. I'm happy to say the OEC is at the centre of London except in old Russia. Mark Charmer from ACT though. We've had a lot from you this morning about the things that are happening but what about the things that you feel are stuck, things that aren't happening? Well what we endlessly discuss in Cabinet and which we're quite rightly there, Prime Minister and the Chancellor hold the rest of us to account is just getting on with implementing our objectives in the growth strategy. That can mean planning delays, it can mean delays in getting the state aid approvals in order for us to deliver the rollout of superfast broadband. So there are those types of obstacles. I'm keen to see even more expansion of London as a global centre for education and it's a theme I want to take forward in the education strand of our industrial strategy which I'll also be leading. In terms of delays I've also been frustrated by the delays in the Galileo satellite programme and that's relevant for cities, very relevant for cities because GPS, when you're only using the American satellite system GPS doesn't always work in crowded urban areas with skyscrapers. There are too many places where there's a shadow that stops the full performance of GPS. What you do when Galileo arrives, not to mention the arrival of also some Russian and Chinese systems, is you at least double the number of satellites available for positioning services and you increase the chances that people in urban areas are able to get extremely accurate global positioning data. One of my responsibilities is space so we try to push that agenda forward and there are so many interactions in today's high-tech world I think paradoxically that the delays in Galileo have been have a direct relevance, the kind of level of service you can offer in a city. Savasberg is from LSEC. We heard in the previous panel the sometimes tension between city government and national government and city government is taking a step forward. What happens when you have tensions for example when you want to promote higher education and you have national government restricting for example student visas? How does your government deal with this tension between the city and the national government? Well, I mean the visa issue, I know it has been a challenge and I recognise the challenge to our perceptions of Britain internationally from the London Met episode but there is no limit on the number of legitimate students that can come to London or Britain as a whole in order to study and that's very important and we are and that's an environment that we need to communicate and I personally need to communicate in all of us in the government especially to markets like India where there are misapprehensions and misunderstandings about our policy. I have to say though, pushing the challenge back, your assumption was that there are cities that wish to grow their universities and there are national policy constraints. It doesn't always feel like that and the example I am about to give, the university involved always dislike it when I cite them but Oxford for example which should be I think a growth centre for higher education there is a deal between Oxford University and the council as far as I can tell really set by the council which states there will only be 3000 Oxford students in private rented accommodation which means if you want to grow Oxford via their collegiate system you need to build new student accommodation before you can grow it so I have other stories from university vice-chances of the difficulties of getting planning permission for extra student accommodation so where I am it sometimes looks as if the constraints are not set always nationally there are sometimes local councils that are trying to stop the growth of a very dynamic and important global British opportunity. Take this one. Thank you. Dan Hill from Fabrica. One of the problems of technology oriented thinking is it can sometimes reproduce the sort of silo based thinking that is common within institutions and governance or has been one of the challenges we absolutely need to address and dissolve in a sense. When I look at the catapult centres in a way they seem to mirror some of that silo based thinking as you have manufacturing cities, transport systems, renewable energy in the economy as all the separate catapults. Surely you want business ideas to emerge which manufacture transport systems based on renewable energy and transport systems and are seen as part of a wider area of the context. So a sort of more joined up thinking, how are the catapults going to address that issue? I mean it is a fair point. However you do need some boundaries somewhere and you can't just do everything everywhere and you need a kind of a spine, a shape to individual entities. Sometimes I get the opposite criticism from yours. I get the criticism that our catapult centres are too broad and if you compare them with say the German Fraunhofer Institutes on which to some extent they're modeled Germany has many more Fraunhofer Institutes I can't remember the exact number but certainly over 50 in more precise technological areas than our catapults so sometimes I get told to narrow rather than to broaden. What they are all intended to be is multidisciplinary and as I hope I said in my speech the future city's catapult in particular is intended to not simply look at technologies but also issues around citizen behaviour, financing and new business models and I think that given cities are the places where all these different technologies, disciplines forms of human experience come together I hope that will certainly be embodied in that catapult above all. David can I take the liberty of asking a last question myself? Having just moved here from New York and sitting which bemoaned a shortage not just of investment the last steps before commercialisation of new technologies but of training and engineering and the strength of the education sector in the background of this this led to the Bloomberg-led initiative that brought Cornell University and Technion to create a major new engineering system to the city. I wonder if there's thinking in London that goes beyond some of what we've heard about the support for the silicon roundabout and the support for the steps very close to the immediate commercialisation of new technologies for example to secure the existence of major kinds of engineering architecture design support in the city and education. No, I agree that but that's actually one of the areas where I am an optimist. I think first of all it's clear that education is one of London's strengths at all levels it looks as if the schools revolution happened in London earlier and has been sustained more than interesting research, not least done by my former researcher Chris Cook now with the Financial Times showing that it looks as if London schools outperform and standards have been rising in London schools for longer and reaching higher levels than elsewhere and of course at the other end of the spectrum one of the other great things about London is mature students often when people want to change take a different educational or career direction in their lives that often involves coming to London and going as a mature student to Birkbeck or somewhere else and getting a new set of skills. London is a place where you come and it could be anything from being made redundant a marriage broken up, just become dissatisfied with the course your career has taken reshaping your life might well involve moving into a city and particularly moving to London and we are very strong in London at that. I looking to America I think there are two lessons from America first of all we are specifically are learning from the Mayor Bloomberg competition and although it's on a more modest scale what I described a few minutes ago about our competition for the future of the Teddington site is modeled on what we have observed in New York there is a substantial site at Teddington it is currently underused we are going to invite partners and they can be overseas they needn't be British to come and do joint ventures with us and develop that site recognising a particular expertise in metrology and final point something else I've learnt from the US that probably doesn't apply so much in London this is less of a problem in London but does apply to some other centre you notice it in America universities are also used as instruments of what I might call demographic competition you use cities that want to revive themselves use universities to attract young people and there is then a clear stickiness if you've got a lot of young people coming to your city to study at a prestigious university quite a few of them stay now London has a very favourable demographic structure but I've had this conversation in places like Newcastle where it's clear that the strength of Newcastle University and also University of Northumbria where Johnny Ive studied design is one of the things that is keeping that they see as ensuring a continuing flow of young people into Newcastle and I think America is much more adept at that city authorities are much more aware of how they can use cities to change their demographic and keep it young and renewing itself and I think that's why I was so frustrated and asked the earlier question about the attitude of some councils towards universities I personally think university growth is one of the ways that university can ensure it has a dynamic, prosperous and vigorous future Thank you very much