Simplify planning laws and Garden Cities could solve our housing crisis June 19, 2013 BRITAIN’s planning regulations are a lawyers’ banquet. A tangled web of 118 Acts of Parliament govern them and, while the legal profession and a new breed of lobbyists known as “planning consultants” may prosper from this quagmire, the economy suffers. This is the theme of a new policy report on Britain’s antiquated planning regime I [...]
Lord Browne to advise $20bn oil and gas fund June 18, 2013 LORD Browne, the former boss of oil giant BP, has joined forces with Russia’s Alfa Group to advise the company on a new $20bn (£12.7bn) global oil and gas fund. The fund, known as the L1 Energy Fund, will be seeded with the proceeds of Alfa’s sale of its stake of TNK-BP, which netted it [...]
Fear and bad policy is holding back the UK’s huge shale potential June 17, 2013 THE US Energy Information Administration (EIA) has just raised its estimate of the UK’s technically-recoverable shale gas to 26 trillion cubic feet (tcf). But it’s actually a little behind the curve. Over two weeks ago, we produced a report which combined the estimates of the exploration companies and came up with a figure of 309 [...]
Once again, it’s the old question: who guards the guardians? June 17, 2013 AS ever, the ancient Greeks and Romans got there before us; they couldn’t conceivably have dreamt of the internet, of the cloud or of National Security Agency (NSA) super-computers in Fort Meade, Maryland, in an as yet undiscovered continent, combing through trillions of phone calls, emails and Facebook pages, but they’d already nailed the gist of [...]
Forget the Old Etonian chumocracy: The Tories are at their least aristocratic ever June 16, 2013 DAVID Cameron’s government is the least patrician, least wealthy and least public school-educated Conservative-led government Britain has ever seen. Fewer Tory MPs were born into wealth and privilege than ever before. More are reliant solely on parliamentary salaries, and fewer have significant outside earnings compared to Tory MPs from previous parliaments. This is not the [...]
Google pays $1.3bn for sat-nav app Waze June 14, 2013 GOOGLE has pipped both Apple and Facebook to buy Waze, an Israeli social mapping service popular amongst commuters. Waze, which has almost 50m members, uses a smartphone’s location data to improve its maps and create real-time traffic information, allowing drivers to take the fastest route to a destination. It is now expected that Google will [...]
Brothers who took a punt on a new market June 13, 2013 Annabel Palmer talks tobacco with Taz and Umer Sheikh: salesmen, business partners, and self-professed pioneers of the growing electronic cigarette industry SIX years ago, the smoking ban came into force in England, making it illegal to smoke in enclosed workplaces. So when I meet Umer Sheikh – the younger of the two Sheikh brothers behind [...]
Brothers who took a punt on a new market | City A.M. June 13, 2013 Annabel Palmer talks tobacco with Taz and Umer Sheikh: salesmen, business partners, and self-professed pioneers of the growing electronic cigarette industry SIX years ago, the smoking ban came into force in England, making it illegal to smoke in enclosed workplaces. So when I meet Umer Sheikh – the younger of the two Sheikh brothers behind [...]
Townsend will not appeal his FA betting ban June 12, 2013 GUILTY Tottenham winger Andros Townsend will not appeal his punishment for breaching the Football Association’s betting rules and has vowed to restore his reputation on the pitch. The 21-year-old was handed a four-month ban and £18,000 fine at an independent regulatory commission hearing yesterday, where he was found to have breached FA Rule E8(b) for misconduct [...]
The rapid rise of the food bank can’t just be blamed on government austerity June 12, 2013 FOOD banks are a rapidly growing phenomenon in the UK. A few years ago, they barely existed, but an estimated half a million people now make use of them every week. On the face of it, it seems that poverty has sadly become endemic since the financial crisis, with many families unable even to feed [...]
