Back in 2018, state-owned Transport for Wales splashed out on a fleet of Class 398 tram-trains from Stadler. That cost more than £200 million of taxpayers’ money…
Three and a half years later, most of the fleet is still parked up in TfW’s new £100 million depot at Taff’s Well. They were meant to be fully operational by 2022, now that date has slipped to 2027…
As it stands, of the 36 tram-trains, 16 have passed their safety checks, and 20 are yet to complete the checks the rail regulator requires. 6 tram-trains, worth about £8m each, which can run both on urban streets and rail, are currently in passenger testing across the network. The King has ridden one for PR purposes. Keir Starmer has ridden one for PR purposes. Actual fare-paying commuters? Nearly zero…
TfW’s excuses are a full house on the bingo card: Covid, Ukraine (inexplicably), supply chains etc. TfW also bought a batch of temporary trains to fill the gap, at an additional cost to the taxpayer. According to TfW, they “got delivered earlier and the reliability was better”, so the old trams are more effective than the new ones. The project is the biggest infrastructure programme since devolution. More to come under Burnham’s relentless nationalisation push…
Years of sycophantic posts from senior Labour figures still up of course…
The Justice Secretary is posting about flying to New York and meeting the NFL on the same day that his department releases 650 prisoners early. The Norriswave…
650 offenders are leaving jails in England and Wales today in the third batch of Labour’s early releases. After serving one third of their sentence…
1,350 prisoners were let out by Labour in the first two waves of the scheme. It will be more than 2,500 by the end of the year…
Meanwhile the Ministry of Justice has today posted a video in which the Justice Secretary Alex Norris boasts about meeting the NFL in New York and how they provide opportunities for people to become coaches in Britain. He says he is a “big fan of” the NFL. Nice to know, pal…
Shadow Justice Secretary Nick Timothy tells Guido:
“Labour are releasing 650 dangerous criminals today, but the Justice Secretary seems more concerned with bragging about his taxpayer funded trip to New York.
Today he should be focused on the victims who are living in fear thanks to his early release scheme, and his broken promise that all these criminals would be tagged.”
The dodgy tagging…
DCMS has spent nearly £400,000 since April on ‘security and facilities’ at Blythe House, the West Kensington museum store it has been trying to sell since 2022. £400,000 to sweep some cobwebs and guard an empty building…
Payments to Chase Services Group and Vertex Services Group have arrived every month, totalling £393,507. The Science Museum moved out in 2024, yet the building remains unsold. And DCMS has signed a new security contract running until January 2028…
HMRC’s tax snoopers are set to photograph Britons’ homes without their permission in order to value them for Labour’s Mansion Tax. When you see a flash through the curtains in the night…
The Tories are campaigning against the tax, and shadow minister David Simmonds has obtained some details of the guidance issued by HMRC to its new army of snoopers:
“HMRC provides guidance to Valuation Office caseworkers undertaking property inspections that internal and external photographs are an important part of a property survey Where photographs are taken from within the property boundary, the occupier’s permission must be obtained. Permission is not required for photographs taken from the public highway Where photographs form part of Council Tax casework, they are retained in accordance with the Valuation Office’s information retention schedules.”
Photographed from the street…
Meanwhile, HM Land Registry is sharing title register information and with HMRC on a monthly basis in order to nail down property details. Next step: satellite images…
David Walliams has finally been named by ITV and The Guardian as the celebrity accused of preying on young girls as young as fifteen. His attempted injunction against the publication of the allegations was thrown out by the High Court…
Walliams said today:
“Looking back, I realise that at times I behaved thoughtlessly towards other people I had casual sexual relationships with… I realise I did not always take people’s feelings properly into account. That is something I regret.
“And whilst a power imbalance is inevitable when one party is famous, abusing that power is something else entirely and it is something that I never did…
“I am not a sexual predator… I have not broken the law… I am devastated that some of the women I met ten to twenty years ago have now expressed hurt or anger towards me.”
Breaking…
Lucy Powell told Sky News that the Ed Miliband-Russell Brand interview happened in part because the ‘social media age’ had not begun by 2015:
“Look, I mean, he approached the Labour Party, he approached the campaign team, and we’re in very different times now. We weren’t in the social media age at the time – where you could maybe search things up and see allegations about somebody at the time. and as I say, if there was any suggestion at all, we were dealing with someone who was a known sexual predator at the time, then, of course, you know, no one would have done that. But as I say, he was a well known public figure. Lots of people from Hollywood to the BBC to many others gave this person a very, very powerful platform. And we didn’t know at the time, unfortunately. It was a different era.”