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…
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.”