Go-Ahead to pay £7m for delayed trains December 20, 2012 THE GOVERNMENT is forcing transport group Go-Ahead to compensate London Midland passengers for cancelled trains and delays to services last year in a package of benefits worth £7m. In compensation, London Midland season ticket holders will be given five days’ worth of free travel passes. A further 500,000 cheap advance tickets for passengers on routes [...]
What the autumn statement means for property players December 20, 2012 Chancellor OF the exchequer George Osborne’s autumn statement, released last month, included a £5.5bn infrastructure package, bringing infrastructure investment to £33bn a year. The funding includes support for long-term private investment in new roads, science, free schools and academies. Osborne also opted to keep property taxes and the rate of stamp duty unchanged, something some [...]
Coya: the last word in Peruvian cuisine December 16, 2012 RESTAURANT COYA 118 Piccadilly, Mayfair, W1J 7NW Tel: 020 7042 7118 FOOD **** VALUE *** ATMOSPHERE *** Cost for two people with wine: £120 COYA WAS easily one of the most talked about openings this autumn. Created by Arun Waney, the man behind La Petite Maison and the uber successful Knightsbridge eatery Zuma, the restaurant [...]
London buses go contactless cards December 12, 2012 BUS passengers will from today be able to use contactless debit or credit cards to pay for journeys, as Transport for London begins its long-awaited rollout of the new payment method. Anyone with a contactless Visa, American Express or MasterCard should be able to tap the yellow Oyster pay point on the capital’s 8,500 buses, [...]
Go-Ahead Group confident it will arrive at full-year forecast December 11, 2012 PUBLIC transport group Go-Ahead Group yesterday said it was confident of meeting forecasted full-year figures, after a welcome boost from the Olympics. In a trading update for the six months ending 29 December, the company said both its rail and bus divisions had delivered a “robust” performance, despite difficult economic times, and expectations for the [...]
Eco and a worthwhile investment December 11, 2012 The LAST time I whizzed about in an EV here was in the scooter-like Renault Twizy, which, though great fun, only seats two. This Mia Electric car – a plug-in, zero emission car with a 80 mile range – from a new French manufacturer of the same name, has three seats or, in the longer [...]
Rapid responses December 10, 2012 Classroom politics [Re: Lessons from Finland: How we can reform maths teaching in schools, yesterday] While I respect professor Burghes’s work, I disagree with his opinion. The greatest threat to maths education in Britain is not poor teachers or a rigid curriculum. It is the huge scale of recent political involvement in how children are taught. Standards [...]
How Londoners are driving away from the rest of Britain December 9, 2012 THOSE of us who work or live in London often have rather different habits than the rest of Britain. Transport is a case in point. No less than 51 per cent of the distance travelled every year by UK residents is as a car driver, and another 27 per cent as a car passenger. Rail [...]
London cabs to get free Wi-Fi December 9, 2012 FREE Wi-Fi will be arriving in London’s taxis in the coming months after a local startup gained the all-clear from Transport for London to hand out its technology to the capital’s cabbies. Entrepreneur Richard Corbett’s Eyetease will offer 15 minutes of free internet access following a short advertising video. Corbett said over 500 taxi drivers [...]
Our at-a-glance guide to Osborne’s mini-Budget December 5, 2012 THE UK ECONOMIC OUTLOOK ■ The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has revised down its forecast for UK growth and revised up its forecast for public sector borrowing. It says the government is no longer likely to meet its target of reducing debt as a proportion of GDP in 2015-16, breaking its supplementary fiscal rule. [...]