black and decker boy

Crossrail was given a red rating but is now operating and I believe, exceeding passenger forecasts. you cannot build NPR without HS2 or n me as divert adding costs & programme into NPR. NPR hadn’t yet got a route defined nor been laid before Parliament so remains at least 10 years from spades in the ground. HS2 2a to Crewe is still 3 or 4 years away from the big ticket works so cancelling it saves pretty much zero this year or next. HS2 2b to Manchester hasn’t yet got it’s act of Parliament consented so is still 6-8 years away from full construction on the ground (and cost) so cancelling it saves pretty much zero this year or next or the year after that. HS2 build cost has been around £5bn per year to date. That will continue for the next 4 to 5 years as phase 1 gets built out & commissioned. the earning potential of a stub branch line from West London suburb into Birmingham is really shockingly limited. HS2 benefits and earnings exists from the whole not from a tiny part. our politicians (and HM Treasury) seem to not understand that and clearly think the population can be hoodwinked into thinking they’ve saved us £50/£60bn today to spend this year which simply isn’t true.

Charging investment continues: The largest InstaVolt charging hub in Cornwall is now live, with 12 chargers at Bodmin Retail Park on the Launceston Road, just off the A30! The site will provide a major boost to EV drivers in the South West and those travelling into Devon and Cornwall during the summer months. The opening follows the launch of our 8 charger hub at Gissons Hotel, just outside of Exeter. With a McDonalds on-site and only 2 minutes from Bodmin town centre, our 12 charger hub is the perfect spot to recharge! 12 Chargers Up to 160kW Improved Accessibility On-site amenities taken from LinkedIn

Thank you. Yes, 5 weeks unemployed and thankfully agreed a new position on Friday. They’ve ordered me a Tesla today - small companies are very agile at decision making it seems. Delivery could be next week. Taking after Mr Ford, my choices were black, black or a long wait. I opted for black!!!

I negotiated a public sector road job a couple of years ago. Client (a county council) had committed delivery dates with their political masters, funders and external developers. They gave me their programme. It was 6 months to design, secure planning, secure DfT grant funding, complete the design and then build it. their own & DfT gateways added up to 8 months. Planning permission, 4 months. we, after a lot of tussle, going round in circles and the involvement of additional external consultants settled on 19months as an achievable target for opening. tgen covid struck and we found utilities they hadn’t thought about. It opened earlier this year, over 36months since I started that negotiation. In 2021 I lead on a national highways mega project (£500m). The project had spent £100m of that pot without delivering anything in the ground except one small roundabout improvement. The rest was spent on designs (we had around 350design staff engaged most months), our staff of just under 100 (50% being on the ground doing surveys etc and commercial staff to pay the bills, 50% doing non construction stuff like comms, HSEQ, EDI, data collection, document control etc), some land purchase, a lot of expensive planning & legal support. HS2 is no different, it’s size & complexity needs large £££ to get it through sufficient design & planning processes to make the hybrid bills work, feed / satisfy any CPO requirements and prepare ITTs and appointment of the design & build contractors. Utility diversions are mega slow, mega expensive and again, need dedicated teams to manage otherwise they become a real & present danger to the main works. Ditto newts, bats, mice, voles, badgers, fish, birds etc. the legal consents to deal with them need multi year surveys and can take up to a year or more to secure. Court injunctions & prosecutions will follow if you ignore such rules and just crack on. It takes years to get these mega projects to the point you can mobilise diggers. That is how our legal policies are set up. That is not HS2 specific. It’s U.K. specific.

They are all 2019 prices. the media like to quote the original budget at £30 odd BN but don’t add that was at 2010(ish) prices and the £71bn is 2019 prices. i doubt we are talking £180bn at 2023 prices (quoted in the press this weekend courtesy of the biased anti Lord Berkeley. But £100bn is most likely I’d say (and will undoubtedly be more in 2040 prices when the final invoices come in).

According to this report to Parliament in June this year, £22.5bn has been spent on phase 1 £0.9bn has been spent on phase 2a £0.7bn has been spent on phase 2b £0.7bn has been spent on east Mids link giving a total of £24.7bn. current rate of spend (and therefore the order of savings that would result in later years of phase 2 was binned) is £5bn per year. Phase 1 is predicted to outturn at £40-45bn. Phase 2a is estimated as up to £7bn Phase 2b is estimated as up to £19bn https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/hs2-6-monthly-report-to-parliament-june-2023

When in Ossett, one must Ossett. And who can’t resist a Yorkshire Blonde. (courtesy of The George) Next carpenters Ale by Westgate Brewery (at the Carpenters Arms) rounding off an exhibition evening out with BAP by Craven Brew Co (at the Prop’Ur Baa) all superb tipples

I didn’t say it wasn’t worthwhile as a principle but alot of our civil service bureaucracy gold plate and add layers to what could be simple things but then it generates jobs at their end so they have no incentive to be more efficient (that’s a whole other team employed to make things look more efficient). And don’t forget, as a public sector customer, they’ll employ an external consultant to validate & verify our data and benchmark against similar projects & organisations so that they have ‘independent ’ auditable outputs. as a contractor, I’ll gather & process any data a paying customer demands but find it galling when that same customer then complains about the cost of all the none construction / core project stuff and associated staff.

You can’t blame HS2 for complying with rules imposed on it, as a public sector organisation, by the very government that then bemoans spending of money on reports such as this. Such reports & rules are not unique to HS2 but imposed on all manner of public sector organisations, projects etc including National Highways and their major projects and local councils when they are lucky enough to win the central government grant lottery. they even include requirements for suppliers & contractors to prove how their policies align with EDI, Modern Slavery, active travel for staff and such like and have quite heavy demands for data collection and monthly reporting on these matters. The amount spent on superfluous data (meaning people to collate, manage and report) that isn’t actually funding or building stuff is immense and can be highly frustrating to circumnavigate.

All set up and ready to go with Harkness

Running early heading to the Wakefield MRS 60th show this weekend where we are showing Harkness. Popped into Harry’s on Westgate.

Plenty of ways around ULEZ & CC (and all other rules) for those so minded. we had a car that got cloned and the clone was purely to evade all of London’s enforcement. We ended up with 10 or 12 summons over a 4 week period (we’d sold the car by that point but the buyer then continued to get them). Most common were CC fines (reg was ULEZ compliant) plus parking fines, bus lane fines etc. luckily I spotted stickers in the clone and was able to prove our car didn’t have them so won all our appeals.

It will clearly be imported since there is currently no U.K. based production of HVO, That means we are still reliant of external parties for our energy. It means traceability of the source oils is harder / more vague. It means we are still competing for scarce resources against the source country and everyone else. It means abuse of the system, use of cash crops and deforestation are real concerns on the production of HVO. HVO is no panacea

It’s ok, Rishi is on the side of the motorist!!!! He’ll ban* such nonsense next week i think there will be enough ANPR cameras across our major towns & cities plus all motorways (most already plastered with them) that road pricing will just need al the back office software linking (cue another civil service IT project overspend and failure) * until after the election

Yes, it was always inevitable but think we’ve a few more years yet. EVs only a small % of U.K. cars currently. the BIK tax I’ve saved in the 4 years I’ve had an EV has been considerable and most fortunate to get. my employers have saved about £6k in fuel payments vs an equivalent diesel (and probably more in avoiding VAT)

And I paid zero VAT* on the solar energy I harvested at home (I paid VAT on the solar array & battery mind you).

I used to get 600 miles from a tank in my diesel 3 series but couldn’t run that for 6p/mile or plug into ‘free’ fuel at home both cars completed the journeys I did for work & leisure without hindrance though

So another chapter of my EV journey comes to an end due to insolvency of my employer. My Tesla M3P is off lease and awaiting collection. in 4 months, I’ve done 6500 miles at a running cost of 6p/mile. Efficiency is 3.1miles per KWH since fitted, our home solar has provided around 20% of my weekly charging I’ve not queued or struggled for charging points though as the car was capable of 300miles on a full charge with my driving style so charging away from home is much reduced compared to the Merc EQB.

These days we have far more geotechnical knowledge and more sophisticated design software. We have design standards that add in factors of safety. we will always do detailed geotechnical analysis of the natural soils and also of soils or aggregates imported to the works. You will mostly find cuttings and embankments to target 1in 3 slopes. Poor ground can be 1 in 4 but you’d avoid that in an embankment. Really good ground could go to 1 in 1.5 but it’s rare and you’d generally reinforce the soils now. Budgets mean land take still has to be minimised so it’s always a balance between slope angle / stability / land take and retaining structures. Different land values create different solutions - narrow alignments with retaining walls in urban areas, cuttings etc in rural areas. Cuttings and embankments form critical part of the road / rail infrastructure (and any drainage systems vital to their stability will sit at their extreme edges) so do not get returned to landowners but are adopted as highway or railway land. They will often be used for landscaping - trees, hedges , wildflowers etc

Without seeing the exact location and comparing to the HS2 published plans I can’t answer definitively. however, land outside of the permanent alignment can and usually is needed and is taken on license from the landowner - in other words rented - and restored & returned to the landowner at the end of construction. Reasons can be: temporary road diversions temporary utility diversions permanent utility diversions or new apparatus temporary haul routes temporary office / welfare material handling / storage plant and equipment compounds land for drainage including new ponds land for new ecology - trees etc

Ahh, my bad, apologies abd968008.

There’s no ‘rumour’ to it. the first batch have already landed in Mexico and been repainted and a second batch are now gathering at GT Yarmouth waiting their Atlantic Cruise to their retirement in the sunshine.

Many are doing but remember that business rates are set centrally and are a part of the loss of our independent shops (just as out of town retail parks and internet shopping are too). Social care is locally funded and is a growing black hole that draws funds away from roads, libraries etc. Very little in local government is ring fenced and councils cannot make a loss so everything gets squeezed.

Of course it’s a tax. Successive funding settlements from Central Government to local governments have been cuts. Local government costs don’t go down no matter how many staff they get rid of. They need to plug the funding gaps. Council tax is effectively capped so they target any source they are legally allowed to. in my industry (construction) that sees us paying for ever more permits & licenses as they raise revenue. domestically, we now pay for garden waste bins (the only type currently not mandated to be included in your council tax). Council cad parks all charge and prices are going up even though they don’t get maintained and are now cashless so less staff needed. We’ve all got to cover the £bns wasted on fake furlough claims, substandard PPE etc and various tax cuts for upper end earners so should expect local ‘taxes’ to grow and not get cancelled.

ULEZ zones across the U.K. are spreading and a function of many things - legal air quality limits (and court cases growing against councils that ignore them), funding settlements (or huge local deficits) and not personal vendetta against motorists. Government is pushing city regions down the ULEZ route for example when they agree the devolution deal and its funding, especially if, as in Manchester, significant public transport investment is planned. the price attached to a ULEZ can and perhaps should be questioned (London is very much more than others). it’s not just a U.K. thing though with various vehicle emissions restrictions / permits in use (or coming) through the EU. what is disingenuous is our PM saying the ULEZ is unjust and then taking helicopters & private jets for short hops to meetings.