Question: What would you describe as your biggest achievement and biggest disappointment since you took the job of deputy mayor in June?

Jenny Jones: I've managed to keep the road safety budget of Transport for London and actually increase it.

That was something that was extremely important to me because road safety is one of those things that everybody thinks is a great idea but they don't really understand its impact on London as a whole.

Because when we talk about road safety we are always talking about the solution. Whereas the problem is actually road deaths, road crime, road violence.

And so actually increasing the road safety budget of Transport for London was something it might have been harder to do as an assembly member.

I'm disappointed about all the budgets that I didn't manage to increase. Travel awareness, particularly.

I think that is an absolutely crucial thing. It is one of those things again that people don't understand very well.

Because travel awareness means encouraging people to look for other ways to make the same journey that they make on a daily basis.

What they have found in other countries is that you can actually reduce the use of cars, but also of public transport, if you encourage people to be aware of their journeys.

We could make a 10 per cent saving on car use, which the congestion charge has done and it has cost millions, whereas travel awareness costs peanuts by comparison and has virtually the same effect.

Question: But you are a fan of the congestion charge?

Jenny Jones: I'm a big fan.

Question: How quickly and how wide would you like to see it expanded?

Jenny Jones: Well the original plan was for a much, much bigger zone.

This central zone is actually quite small and so the impacts aren't felt very far.

I personally would like to see a charging zone out to the M25. You would then have three separate zones within that, the more expensive zone being in the centre where the public transport is much better.

And so it would be cheaper as public transport fell away as it were.

Question: Do you think the mayor was right to start with a smaller zone to begin with given public and press scepticism about the idea?

Jenny Jones: I have supported this right from the beginning.

It was not the scheme I wanted to see but I think it was an act of political bravery to do it at all.

I accept that for him it was the right thing to do. But I think equally now people have seen what a success it is it is possible to extend it and extend it much further than he is planning at the moment.

Question: Do you think the public is ready for road charging on that scale?

Jenny Jones: I think they are. I think there are people against expansion but they are actually fewer than those who would favour it.

If you talk to people who live within the central charging zone they absolutely love it.

That would be true if the zone were the whole of Southwark where I live. I would love to have a congestion charging zone.

Question: But they are only paying 50 pence per day. If that were the case for everyone would it bring in as much money?

Jenny Jones: But you wouldn't operate it like that. There are two ways of doing it.

You either have separate zones all over, a patchwork of zones. Or you would do it differently using satellite navigation techniques.

Everybody would have a chip in their car and as they drove around they would be charged for what they are doing. That sort of scheme is much more sophisticated.

The mayor decided he couldn't wait for that. Because it would be more challenging to get all these chips in people's cars.

But if the government goes ahead with its promises for road pricing then this will be fairly simple because people will have to have the chip to travel elsewhere.

We here in London could pilot a scheme for that and I think that would be really exciting.

If you had a bigger engine, you could pay more. If you had a more polluting car you would have to pay more and so on. It would encourage smaller, cleaner vehicles if people insist on using cars.

Question: But is the government not even more nervous about road pricing than the mayor is?

Jenny Jones: Yes, I'm not holding my breath waiting for them to fulfil that promise. But I think it is going to come. So it is just a matter of when.

Question: Has the rest of the assembly and the mayor's performance as a whole been as pioneering in terms of environmental issues?

Jenny Jones: People who have been watching us from the very beginning and who were watching the legislation going through parliament before the assembly and before the authority was established, have said that they are quite astonished at how green so much of our work is.

And they meant particularly the assembly I think, in terms of its scrutiny work.

Their opinion was that having three greens here has more or less panicked other parties into brushing up their green credentials.

Question: So has there been a cross-party green consensus?

Jenny Jones: No, very much not. I think that is one of the real flaws of the assembly. It is where the legislation is falling down in many ways.

The assembly, because of the way it is structured, becomes tribal and sectarian. And so there isn't much cross-party working, not as much as there could have been.

It will be interesting to see if that changes now that we have a mayor who is in a political party rather than an independent. But I rather suspect it might not.

There are lots of flaws. The assembly has no power, that is part of the problem.

It is all very well us scrutinising what the mayor does and commenting on it and making a fuss about it.

But we can't actually do much about it. All we can do is block his budget. But to block his budget we've actually got to agree and that becomes quite difficult.

Question: Would you pick any of the parties out in particular for praise or for criticism?

Jenny Jones: I wouldn't really. I think that there has very much been a sort of Labour-Lib Dem stitch-up in terms of them trying to run the assembly between the two parties which has sometimes excluded the Tories and very often excluded the Greens.

I don't find that acceptable. If you have a PR system you have to acknowledge that every party has a right to be there, whether or not you like them.

These four years have been sometimes wasted, I think we have wasted opportunities. But that is partly the way its structured.

Question: Why do you think London has greater Green support than other parts of England?

Jenny Jones: We have little pockets of "Greenness". It is quite surprising that the Green vote in the inner cities is actually quite sturdy and robust.

We have seen in places like Lancaster where we got seven on the council in one election.

Inner city people in particularly understand that they are lacking a decent environment and they see that we want to improve the city in a particular way and they like that.

It is going to be interesting in this election because our percentage is always better at the election than it is in the polling. I don't understand why that is but it happens every time.

It happened in the Scottish Parliament for example, where we were only expected to get five or something and we got seven in the end, more than the Scottish Socialist Party who were being trumpeted as the next big thing.

Question: Are you surprised that the Green vote has not taken off more in rural areas given issues such as GM?

Jenny Jones: I think rural areas are particularly traditional and "small c" conservative.

Therefore they are quite slow to change their ways. But in some country areas we do quite well as well.

Once we get one person elected, that is usually the breakthrough. But of course for us, proportional representation would give us a massive opportunity and we do well where we have PR.

I talk to German Greens and Belgian Greens and so on and they thing our getting 11 per cent for the GLA was phenomenal.

We've got German Greens in government who got there on a seven per cent vote.

Question: Might regional assemblies be one way of expanding the work the Green group do in London to new areas?

Jenny Jones: Absolutely. But I've read somewhere that this London assembly is going to be the pattern for the rest of the regional assemblies and I'm not sure if that is appropriate at all.

Question: Are there any other green taxes that you would propose other than road pricing?

Jenny Jones: How Green economics work is that if you pollute, you have got to pay the costs of cleaning up that pollution, i.e. the polluter pays.

Once you look at things like that, the whole economic structure becomes very different.

For example, organic produce would actually be much, much cheaper on that basis than conventional farming.

Because if you started thinking about knocking up all the nitrates, spillage and all the terrible things that come off ordinary farms you start to realise that their produce is getting much more expensive.

You asked me about what I am most pleased about. Something that I am hugely pleased about is that the mayor has said he is restarting the London Food Commission and I am going to chair that.

That is something that is going to extend beyond my period as deputy mayor. That's going to be exciting.

The mayor has said he is going to set up a plastics recycling plant. Now, if ever a city needed a plastics recycling plant it is London.

It is incredibly difficult at the moment to collect and recycle plastic. That is something that the mayor can immediately make a difference on but out of all the boroughs.

For example at the moment most boroughs collect paper, which is one of the worst things you can recycle because there is no profit in it.

If we can start collecting things where there is profit, i.e. aluminium cans and plastics, you get to the point where people can be rewarded for recycling and have money off their council tax if it's a good year.

Or if they recycle for 24 weeks out of 26 their names go into a draw for getting solar panels on their house or something.

Question: Do you see this as a way of raising extra tax revenues or of cutting the burden of council tax?

Jenny Jones: Greens believe that people are prepared to pay for public services and people are prepared to be concerned about the poor in society.

Here in London we have got some of the poorest boroughs in Europe, real pockets of deprivation and I think Londoners accept that you have support people who can't help themselves.

I don't want to see a massive increase in council tax but I do want to see a healthy social awareness and I think council tax is part of that.