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The government has at last launched a formal consultation on the creation of Great British Railways (GBR), several years after the launch of the Williams Review in 2018 that ended up as the Williams-Shapps report in 2021 recommending a GBR. Although the previous Conservative governments gave oral support to a proposal which bore the name of their transport secretary, the closest they came to implementing it was a dummy Bill, a kind of dress rehearsal for what might become the real thing before the script had been written. Labour supported Great British Railways in opposition and continues to do so.  An Act to renationalize the railways as franchises come up for renewal has already been enacted.  This should put a stop to the use of government subsidies that create profits and shareholder dividends for the train operating companies, and the absurd  legal costs whenever ...

This article was first published in Housing Today. The government – and housebuilders – must be given the best possible chance of achieving its ambitious target writes Ben Derbyshire Nobody wants new homes built nearby because what housebuilders do looks horrible and inevitably overwhelms local infrastructure – right? Well, hold on. How else can the government achieve its target of a million and a half new homes within the life of this parliament? According to the 2024 Competition & Markets Authority report, in 2021-22 the largest 11 speculative housing developers together supplied around 40% of new homes built. The government response has been to instigate bold reforms to housing delivery targets for councils and an overhaul of the planning system, investing in affordable housing and encouraging SME developers. Even with the welcome additional £350m funding for social housing announced last week, almost half of ...

Since volunteering to take on management of London Forum's website and email communications in November, having become a Trustee at the 2024 AGM, I've been making a few improvements, with a few more in the pipeline. The aim has been to:

• Better present the information the Forum already has.
• Improve the way we present news and other material in future.
• Improve news emails, and make them more regular.
• Integrate the various strands of news that the Forum produces, so that they can be communicated in a consistent and more digestible way, to members and farther afield.
• Facilitate better member interaction - more on that below.

I've done much of this by recycling a significant number of tried-and-tested ideas developed over the last few years at the Hammersmith Society, where I'm currently chair. There's a lot of commonality in what we do, and ...