The government’s desire to be seen to be doing things at pace is already leading to poor and costly decisions. 👇
transportactionnetwork.org.uk/toxic-concre...

On my Transport Insights blog I unpick some of the contradictory stories about how much the Lower Thames Crossing will cost taxpayers before construction begins, now set to reach £2bn against "departmentally agreed" benefits of £3bn.

transportinsights.blog/2025/10/15/m...

Inaccurate spin about spin.
"*Keir Starmer’s* plan to blame *Nigel Farage* for budget tax rises"
vs
"Ms Reeves told Sky News the economy was still suffering from the impacts of leaving the European Union, austerity policies and Liz Truss’s mini-budget."
Pointless, self-indulgent client journalism

The govt does not have data on the no. of public electric vehicle chargepoints that have been installed but are not operational due to connection delays or other issues.

But it is promising to "continue to monitor" the effectiveness of actions to address it.

transportinsights.blog/2025/10/15/c...

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the lobbyist-sponsored panels at party conferences have “become the pay-to-play red-light district of British democracy: sponsors literally rent the rooms by the hour”

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

In 2024, National Highways acted on a handful of the 1,236 high-risk outfalls.

Without challenging targets and sufficient funding to clean up these outfalls and soakaways it will only tackle a few, making very little difference to reducing water pollution actionnetwork.org/letters/stop...

In fact *the* Prince was 5’2”
www.theguardian.com/stage/2025/o...

I reported yesterday's Guardian story that ministers had stripped National Highways of responsibility for the Lower Thames Crossing with the headline "Ministers keep control of Lower Thames Crossing" and it appears most of it was based on a misunderstanding.

transportinsights.blog/2025/10/14/n...

There's actually lots of interesting background in this story, but nobody thought to wonder why things got slower moving from August into September.

www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cars/a...

And our Labour government is leading the charge
www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...

On my Transport Insights blog, I try to unpick the latest on the Lower Thames Crossing, which remains a very confused picture, despite ministers' macho approach.

Read for free and sign up for free...

transportinsights.blog/2025/10/13/m...

Further down Phillipson shows that she really shouldn’t be trusted with a diary slot in the New Statesman:

“A quick stop off at the Mirror party before bed, where I was thankfully not performing.”

🤦‍♀️

Gifted a diary slot in the New Statesman, Bridget Phillipson shows why she really shouldn’t be deputy Labour leader:
“I’ve made clear that ending the two-child limit is very much (drum roll) on the table.”

www.newstatesman.com/diary/2025/1...

Marr also shows that he doesn’t understand that reviewing an international treaty is beyond the powers of even “Britain’s next prime minister”:
“She intends to have two major reviews of the European Convention on Human Rights”

www.newstatesman.com/politics/202...

Andrew Marr demonstrates the old hack adage, never let the word “some” get in the way of a good story:

“ministers express their outrage about the way the visa system has been exploited, so that people on post-Brexit social-work visas have moved straight into the black economy and drug gangs”

On my Transport Insights blog, I try to unpick the latest on the Lower Thames Crossing, which remains a very confused picture, despite ministers' macho approach.

Read for free and sign up for free...

transportinsights.blog/2025/10/13/m...

A Kent police spokesperson had initially sought to justify the arrest

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

If passenger numbers at Heathrow have "only" gone up a little bit in a climate emergency, is that a bad thing or a good thing?

The Standard thinks passenger numbers should keep going up and it's a bad thing if they don't go up quickly enough.

transportinsights.blog/2025/10/13/h...

“Taking it outside of National Highways’ roads programme and treating it as a stand-alone project, with a DfT-signed blank cheque, risks going the same way as HS2 with ballooning budgets and no accountability.” - @ecochris.bsky.social in @theguardian.com www.theguardian.com/business/202...

The Department for Transport twice gave misleading information about a secretly shelved National Highways scheme in reports submitted to Parliament in the name of transport secretaries.
Parliamentary oversight subverted to conceal a controversial decision.

transportinsights.blog/2025/10/10/m...

If I was training hacks, I’d tell them not to describe spin doctors as “allies” - or even allow them anonymity for their scripted quotes *on behalf of* their employer

Morgan is embarrassing here.
He’s not remotely interested in answers… only Gotchas!
@zackpolanski.bsky.social has his measure.
All Morgan can do, when the argument is escaping him, is talk over Zack & move the conversation on to culture wars in a desperate attempt to score points.
We see you, Piers!

Marr finds himself calling out the bullshit from editor Tom McTague at the front of the same issue:

the general feeling that Burnham’s intervention had strengthened Starmer in the short term congealed into a deeper sense that this had been a “good conference”

www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-...