New Zealand offers one of the best case studies on housing policy. Auckland made it easier to build housing. Wellington didn't. Results speak for themselves:

Our new policy fellow Stuart Hudson - former Senior Director of Strategy at the CMA & No10 adviser - sets out some principles for a Labour government on regulation. He argues in favour of radical regulatory reform, starting with consolidation of our multiple economic regulators.

The Northumberland Rail project has seen 250,000 riders in the time they forecast for just 50,000 Good news? Well yes, but this begs the question. How many high-demand transit projects like this dont event leave the station due to a wrongly predicted cost-benefit-scenario?

This is bleak. Not a single new home was started in two-thirds of London's 33 boroughs. We need an urgent rewrite of the London Plan.

Councillors everywhere:

A wonderful paper by Spears et al. showed that population reduction would have almost no impact on climate change. Why? The main reason is that a baby born today will emit much less carbon than someone born a generation ago, and their children will emit even less carbon. 🧵

Hinkley Point C was announced in 2010, given a site license in 2012, had construction begin in 2017, and is expected to come online around 2030.

Apparently, solar and wind cannot independently initiate a blackstart without external power to activate inverters, as they depend on grid voltage to synchronize. Energy experts have warned me that coordinating renewables during blackstart requires advanced control systems,

Before the outage hit, Spain was running its grid with very little dispatchable spinning generation, and therefore no much inertia. Solar PV/thermal + wind: ~78% Nuclear: 11.5% Co-generation: 5% Gas-fired: ~3% (less than 1GW) Snapshot at 12.30pm local time (outage was 12.35pm)

We are just in the car back from focus groups this weekend in Beverley, Hull,Scunthorpe & Peterborough and without doubt the disillusionment was the worst I’ve heard, in every group it was anger; despondency or misery about the state of Britain that doesn’t feel sustainable.

The UK produces the least amount of electricity per capita out of all G7 countries, it's no surprise our energy is so expensive. If we don't want to end up in Spain's situation, we need to aggressively start building more grid connections and energy projects now.

I didn't realize just how much rail investment in Britain is just going to HS2. More than 70% of the total!

In any other major city in Europe the streets of Soho would obviously be pedestrianised and businesses/visitors on a glorious day like today could enjoy al fresco dining. But thanks to Westminster Council and the way we give outsized power to absurd local complaints, not here!

Britain's shoplifting problem is so bad you need a log scale

I was reading through one of the "AI will cause explosive growth" model papers and I think the key assumptions that are likely to be just wrong are that human labour and AI are perfect substitutes for every task and that every task can theoretically be automated

A reminder of China’s live-fire exercises around Taiwan. Map from this week’s Economist piece on the exercises foreshadowing a Chinese blockade of the island.

🧵 How did Britain become a low trust society? After the war, Lee Kuan Yew came to London. He was amazed to watch newspapers being sold with no attendant, customers took their paper and paid the exact amount. This was the kind of society he went back to Singapore to build.

2/ Start with voters: Brits are not exactly tempermentally optimistic, but I still found this polling pretty shocking. Across measures and parties, Brits reckon that their neighbourhoods and public services are appreciably worse than a decade ago. Something is awry.

I basically think if Labour delivered on this sentiment from Antony Crosland (a labour right hero figure!) they’d win, so many places in the country have been left to fall into disrepair (closed shops, badly maintained space, nowhere to go), it’s barely a political talking point

Filled out application Wednesday morning. Post old passport Wednesday afternoon. New (blue 🥰) passport arrives Saturday morning. Standard application, no expedited options. Extraordinary. We need to get whoever runs the passport office running the rest of government.