Simon Jeffrey

Lime’s UK revenue from renting out e-bikes and scooters hit £111m last year. www.londoncentric.media/p/lime-is-ea...

Suppliers want help for billpayers as energy prices rise Companies call for an

This could have been a ‘bills falling’ story. But sodding social tariffs. If you want richer people to help poorer people pay their utility bills use the flipping tax and benefit system we have to do that fairly and efficiently. It’s like re-inventing council tax but much worse.

Sounds like the parity of esteem Andy Burnham has long been pushing for.

British public does seem to be exceptionally keen to embrace all big sporting events held here in huge numbers. Set huge records for Paralympics, women’s Euros (fair play to Switzerland for beating it this summer) and now women’s Rugby World Cup

The ‘revised’ offer seems to be the original offer on the table of 3.4% (RPI in Feb) this year and RPI for 2 more years. Nothing about 32-hr work week or fatigue. The Lime/Lizzie/login from home effect at work?

'This new online system might lead us to miss serious cases because there will be so many requests'

'When we get too many cases by phone now we just pull the plug out the wall...'

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Fund a few editors to create a BBC (Local) Monitoring but covering local media from papers to Substacks and newsletters. A budget of £41k per council could go a lot further than one journalist. Selling a few stories a year could top up subscription incomes for one-man-bands (and help sell more subs)

BBC’s Local Democracy Reporting Service seems to be a bung to Reach et al at the moment. Rather than directly fund journalists for them, flipping to act as a purchaser and cross-poster of any public interest local journalism. Would fund and help promote a wider (more deserving?) ecosystem.

And we should be having a proper debate about what the right level is for the personal allowance.
One that recognises the extent of the changes/fiscal vandalism (delete as appropriate) of the 2010s.

ifs.org.uk/taxlab/taxla...

And said cash savings to protect against income shocks means test you out of even the meagre 'universal' credit support that is on offer. For plenty of people, the system takes them from 'wow that's not a lot of money, should be higher' to 'Oh I don't even get that?! fuck this' in <7 seconds.

Focusing on restoring universalism a better start before jumping to contribution. Child benefit withdrawal bad enough but perverse
with household earnings permutations e.g. £80-20k vs £50-50k. UC asset limits - renting and saving madly for a deposit? No help. Huge mortgage and pension savings? Fine.

First time I’ve needed to catch one and was similarly a bit sceptical but genuinely quite a different thing. TfL needs to put all its bus routes on a serious bus stop diet. Way too much stopping.

London buses: The universal appeal of simplicity This morning, I found myself mentioned on Jarrett Walker's excellent transport planning blog Human Transit , with reference to my though...

Will take any opportunity to post this old blog on what a revised, rationalised and rapidified inner/central London bus network could look like. Also, bring back bendy buses.

Took the chance to get catch the Bakerloop on launch day for lunch in Elephant Park. 20 mins from Lewisham through decent traffic. Excellent. Orbital Superloop is fine but London needs more of these arterial express buses.

Great news to hear Aarhus' cap on legal costs is under review - a whopping subsidy to comedy legal cases from Nimbys, funded by you, the taxpayer

The Stockton and Darlington Railway, the world's first public railway to use steam locomotives, opened on this day 1825. Its first line linked collieries near Shildon with Darlington and Stockton. (Painting of opening day by Terence Cuneo, 1949, National Railway Museum.)

Lots of things that might not score as highly as child poverty metric but contribute to that and wider goals. But they’ve put themselves in a horrible political management position to do that now.

Despite reports I really struggle to see govt abolishing this, at least not fully. Set a child poverty target and aim for it in the way that matches whole of govt strategy. That’s boosting growth, helping working people and, more recently, fairness. This is not most people’s view of fairness.

It’s a scandal/case study in policy failure in its own right. Must be in the 10s (100s?) of billions of pounds of cost by now. And yet still no one has gone to prison over the fire. Not going to find many better summaries of the failures of British state today. Unserious when it matters.

Govt reaction to Grenfell has combined unforeseen rank incompetence at Building Safety Regulator with completely predictable knackering of resi viability in London via cripplingly expensive yet meretricious regulations. Plus the vast financial and mental toll on flat-owners with cladding too.

Brighton Gasworks is major project and would always go to planning cttee. But opposition and pressures similar all the way down. Minister is probably going to be writing a lot of these letters for sites of 10-49 units in next few years. Cut out the 2yr delay by raising threshold for call-in to 50.

Loud objectors will use every tool available to pile on pressure on cllrs to call in/go against advice/their own LP/lose on appeal/pay costs. Minister should do much more to protect cllrs and Local Plans by making schemes <50 units on allocated sites delegated to professional planning officers.

All good from the minister. But makes the proposed changes to planning cttees stranger: anything >9 units even on an allocated site could be called in by cllrs. Barely empowers ‘plan-led system’ or local democracy vs loud objectors dragging cllrs into site-by-site mini-refs.

Following approval of recovered appeal on Brighton Gasworks by @matthewpennycookmp.bsky.social the council has had full costs awarded against them. The letter from PINs is v robust & makes clear that no. of objections is not a planning consideration-it's the substance of the objection that matters

Pride in Place Programme phase 2: methodology note

The Pride in Place Programme - announced today - has published its allocations.

At first glance, I think £3.5 billion of the £5 billion is new - mooted in the Spending Review - and £1.5 billion is from the Long-Term Plan for Towns that has been previously announced.
www.gov.uk/government/p...

Payment and delivery screen on the SNCB/NMBS website. The delivery options are "PDF by email" and "Load into E-ID" the latter adds 'You don't need a card reader, just enter your national registration number'

UK Bluesky arguing about digital ID, while here in Belgium I'm buying some train tickets... this is a much better argument for government ID than "you have to have this so government can be tougher on migrants"

If they don’t have it, Lime data - where people are travelling, when, revenues/costs - is probably as valuable to TfL and their wider business planning as actually doing anything with the eventual licensing. Long term, integration into TfL services including Boris Bikes seems inevitable.

Great scoop. Hackney the most cycle-centric part of the city due to the demographics, location and relatively weak/absent rail and tube links. No surprise e-bike hire companies in a bidding war - Hackney is their Premier League TV rights. Great to see the lid lifted ever so slightly on the business

‘His greatest enemy was … himself’

Hopefully refocuses the govt towards rebalancing levies from electricity to gas. Need to ensure EV/heat pump are the value option vs ICE/gas even as Net Zero Dad prosumer tariff strategies become less bountiful.