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Telegraph
4 days ago
- Telegraph
My £1,000-a-month commute is so hellish I'm forced to move to London
My mother often says that 'hell is not a place, it's other people'. But I have in fact come to discover that it is a place. That place, or rather journey, is the West Midlands Railway service to Milton Keynes Central. Every week, I spend hours on their trains. I'm often hit by delays or cancellations, and am nearly always late home, questioning my sanity as I sprint alongside hundreds of others to fight for a space. It should take an hour to get to work – taxi to the station, train to Euston, then four stops on the Victoria line. But one day last week, I spent a record seven hours of my life commuting. That's a full work day, and I had to pay for the privilege of being there. Now, after three years of spending nearly £1,000 a month on a journey that truly brings out the worst in humanity, I'm moving to London and saying goodbye to my savings. My monthly travel outgoings consist of taxis to and from the station, costing between £10 and £15. My peak-time return train journey costs £18.60, even with a 16-25 railcard. Then add another £5.80 a day for a sweltering ride on the Victoria line. In all, I spend an average of £247 a week, or £988 a month. It's no longer financially beneficial for me to continue living at home. A monthly ticket from Hemel Hempstead to Euston is £470.80 (railcard discounts don't apply), meaning it's actually more expensive than what I'm paying now. Even my 17-year-old brother spends £100 on train fares just to get to college... one stop away. In March, fares rose 4.6pc. At the same time, thousands of trains journeys go nowhere every year. On average, 3.4pc of UK trains are cancelled – rising to 4.3pc on West Midlands routes, lucky me! On top of cancellations, there are delays. Only 64pc of West Midlands trains run on time, and last year more than 200,000 trains were cancelled. Delays cause overcrowding. I'm often left without a seat, or forced to wait for the next train. Then, of course, there are the strikes which leave me stranded. This has left me facing the London dilemma. Do I pay more to rent in London and save my sanity? I stayed home while studying for a master's degree, planning to move out after, but couldn't afford to on the £22,000 salary I earned at my first job. I'm in a different position now, but moving will still significantly dent my bank balance. Unsurprisingly, I am not alone. More than half of all 20- to 24-year-olds still live at home. Moving to London is, financially, barely palatable. According to Spareroom, the listings site, the average price for rent in London is £980 per month. This excludes ever-rising council tax, groceries – and of course, the cost of a pint. But I think I might go mad if I spend too much time waiting for my train to never arrive. I just have to decide which financial stress suits me more. My number one priority when I move into the city is to cut down my commute. Thankfully, my housemates-to-be are keen to live fairly centrally. But £1,000 a month really does not go very far. I'll likely end up in an ex-council flat, with no outdoor space, dishwasher or nearby Tube station. I have friends who were forced to move out of their flat when water started pouring through their light fixtures and it was deemed potentially life-threatening to continue living there. Their landlord painted over the damage. Now, they're taking legal action to get their deposit back. While this may all sound like a first-world problem, I think it speaks to a wider issue of Britain's failing essential services. If I'm feeling forced to move into London, I can assume I'm not the only one. This is only going to contribute to the housing crisis in the capital and push rent prices up as rooms become even more competitive. Without living at home, I couldn't have afforded my master's degree or accepted a £22,000 salary to start my career. But most young people don't have that option. Now, I can barely afford to live rent-free because I'm being fleeced daily. Ultimately, I have been left with no choice. I'll be moving into London in two months. I'm not sure how I'll save for a house or have a life, but at least I won't be running for the train.
Sky News
06-07-2025
- Sky News
I was reporting in London on the day of the 7/7 bombings - here's what happened
I heard about the 7/7 bombings from the guard on my train into London. Well, sort of. We had ground to a halt sometime after 9am just outside Croydon when he ambled through our carriage to warn us there was trouble ahead - a power surge had knocked out the whole of the London Underground network. That was all he could tell us, so I had to work out the rest for myself from ringing the people who might really know what was going on. At that stage, officially, the emergency services were dealing with a fire at Aldgate Tube station. A senior press officer at Scotland Yard, the Metropolitan Police headquarters, told me rather more than he would normally have done: it was serious, several incidents, some casualties. "Anyone dead?" I asked. "Yes, but please don't report that yet," he said. "Maybe." 3:10 I was told there were explosions at five Tube stations and anti-terror branch officers were on their way. At around 9.40am, via my mobile phone from the train carriage, I repeated all that live on Sky News. While I was on air a colleague, producer Bob Mills, phoned in with an extraordinary account of him seeing a blast rip apart a red double-decker bus near Euston. When I finally put down the phone my fellow passengers were understandably alarmed. So was I. And not for the first time, I was in the wrong place as a major crime story was breaking, and if I was worried, it was more that my rivals would be getting ahead of me on the details. Sky News was already showing helicopter footage of dazed and bloodied passengers emerging from Aldgate Tube station. The more seriously injured were being stretchered away. All Underground and bus services were suspended, and with no taxi in sight and through the drizzle, I walked the two and a half miles from Cannon Street station to Scotland Yard in Westminster. I was headed against a tide of bewildered people through damp streets that echoed with the wail and screech of emergency vehicle sirens. At precisely 11.10am my phone died as the whole mobile system crashed under the weight of calls. I was told later that Scotland Yard had considered shutting the network for fear the bombs - like those that killed 193 train commuters in Madrid a year earlier - had been triggered by mobile phones used as timers. I got to Scotland Yard around 11.30am, joined a posse of reporters and our own live camera crew on the pavement outside, plugged in my earpiece and was there, day and night, for three weeks. Read more: 7/7 - the bravery of victims and responders 20 years on How Prevent is tackling extremism 20 years on Why is the govt's anti-terrorism programme controversial? Before midday, Met Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair went on TV, saying that the capital had been hit by "probably a major terrorist attack". He repeated, mistakenly, what I had reported, that there had been five Underground explosions. In fact there were only three, at Aldgate, Edgware Road and Russell Square stations. Get Sky News on WhatsApp Follow our channel and never miss an update Tap here to follow The confusion arose because some survivors had escaped by walking through tunnels and emerging above ground further away at King's Cross and Liverpool Street. The bombs were a huge shock, but not unexpected. My mind went back four years to the al Qaeda 9/11 attacks in the United States. Days after 9/11, at a meeting of the Metropolitan Police Authority, I had listened to the then-commissioner Sir John Stevens tell the committee: "Make no mistake, we're next." By 1pm police sources suggested at least 40 people had died with hundreds injured, many seriously. In an evening report I raised the spectre of suicide bombers. If confirmed they would be the first in the UK. I was told by someone who had been to the site of the bus blast that a body recovered there had injuries consistent with those found on suicide bombers in Israel and Iraq. 1:22 At 6.13pm police announced that at least 37 were dead. It went up to 38 that night when a critically injured victim died in hospital. The eventual death toll was 52. It had been an extraordinary day, but there was much more drama to come over the next three weeks, with the discovery of the bomb factory in Leeds, unexploded devices, the identities of the terrorists, an attempted copycat attack and the shooting by police of Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes, 27, mistaken for a would-be bomber. Britain's terror threat had changed forever. Who were the victims of the 7/7 bombings The 52 victims of the London terror attack on 7 July 2005 are remembered with a memorial in Hyde Park. Here are the names of the victims and where they were killed. Russell Square James Adams, 32 Sam Badham, 35 Philip Beer, 22 Anna Brandt, 41 Ciaran Cassidy, 22 Rachelle Chung For Yeun, 27 Liz Daplyn, 26 Arthur Frederick, 60 Karolina Gluck, 29 Gamze Gunoral, 24 Lee Christopher Harris, 30 Ojara Ikeagwu, 56 Emily Jenkins, 24 Helen Jones, 28 Susan Levy, 53 Shelley Mather, 26 Michael Matsushita, 37 James Mayes, 28 Behnaz Mozakka, 47 Mihaela Otto, 46 Atique Sharifi, 24 Ihab Slimane, 24 Christian Small, 28 Monika Suchocka, 23 Mala Trivedi, 51 Adrian Johnson, 37 Tavistock Square Anthony Fatayi-Williams, 26 Jamie Gordon, 30 Giles Hart, 55 Marie Hartley, 34 Miriam Hyman, 31 Shahara Islam, 20 Neetu Jain, 37 Sam Ly, 28 Shyanuja Parathasangary, 30 Anat Rosenberg, 39 Philip Russell, 28 William Wise, 54 Gladys Wundowa, 50 Aldgate Lee Baisden, 34 Benedetta Ciaccia, 30 Richard Ellery, 21 Richard Gray, 41 Anne Moffat, 48 Carrie Taylor, 24 Fiona Stevenson, 29 Edgware Road Michael Stanley Brewster, 52 Jonathan Downey, 34 David Graham Foulkes, 22 Colin William Morley, 52 Jennifer Vanda Nicholson, 24 Laura Webb, 29
Times
06-07-2025
- Politics
- Times
How I reported on the London bombings — and the woman who cheated death
On Wednesday July 6, 2005, London had been chosen to host the 2012 Olympics, prompting jubilation and an instant statement from Jack Straw, the foreign secretary. I was the parliamentary sketchwriter for The Times and the first week of July had been heady. The most sketchable thing on the Commons agenda on Thursday, July 7, was expected to be environment questions and I had planned to cover that. But by the time I arrived at the press gallery, reports of the bombs had began to filter through. All of us who worked in the paper's tiny Westminster office knew this would be one of those days that you cannot forget. 'We are going to need you elsewhere today,' the news editor said. I was sent to Tavistock Square near Euston, where there were reports that a bus had exploded. By now there was no public transport and so I walked, joining the streams of Londoners on foot that day. The next hours were a blur, arriving and seeing the No 30 bus and the horror of the debris. No one talked loudly. Trauma inspired mostly silence. I talked to everyone, asking questions gently, acutely aware that I was asking people who had already been traumatised to relive it for me, more or less immediately. We did not know at the time how many had died, only that many had. It would later be confirmed that 13 people had died on the bus that day. Everyone's stories included a mix of the mundane ('I wanted to catch that bus') and what felt like fate ('What would have happened to me if I had?'). • 7/7: the day that changed London for ever I interviewed Jasmine Gardner, 22, while she was huddled under an emergency blanket and although she was shaking, her words were composed. She, and so many others, showed such courage that day. Afterwards I joined the crowds walking home, hearing the solid tramp tramping of feet. For me, that will always be the sound of resilience and London. Originally published July 8, 2005 When Jasmine Gardner saw the No 30 bus pass by in Tavistock Square, she was desperate to get on it. She had just been forced off the Underground at Euston but, like thousands of others, had no idea why. All she knew was that she had to get to work and this double-decker was going her way. The driver stopped to let a few people off, but did not let anyone on. Why? The bus was not full. Jasmine, 22, walked alongside, irritated, and the bus pulled ahead. She was walking briskly, intent on catching it, when it exploded. Bits of metal rained on her umbrella; a storm-cloud of debris, solids and flesh, filled the air. It was 9.47am. A bomber had struck. She grabbed the person closest and they ran. The bus had been destroyed. 'I thought that everyone must have died.' It did not take long before she realised how close she had come to disaster. When I interviewed her, she was still shaking, wrapped in a blue St John Ambulance blanket. No one knew how many had died on the bus but everyone assumed the worst. The police had cordoned off the square but, even at a distance, you could see the elegant façade of the British Medical Association splattered with bits of blood and bodies. 'Blood and guts,' whispered a man sadly as we stood at the cordon. 'Blood and guts.' Lorenzo Pia, an Italian postgraduate medical student, was leaving his nearby flat when he heard the blast. 'The bus was without shape,' he said. 'Four or five injured people were walking about. They were dripping with blood, some from the head, others from legs and arms. Five or six people were lying in the street. They were not moving 'One of the injured was a young teenage girl who had blood streaming down her face. Another, an elegantly dressed man, had a leg injury. A woman was crying. She had blood down her face too, but there wasn't any panic or screaming. People just got on with helping each other.' Sharleen Cunningham-Brown, 26, was walking along when she heard, and felt, the impact of the bomb. She saw people, presumed dead, on the pavement. She ran into a doorway, and hugged the strangers she found there. 'Everyone was crying and hugging each other,' she said. 'It was like it was chaos and then, a few seconds later, it was quiet.' It was some time before anyone spoke the word terrorism. Even then, it did not seem real. It was early evening before reports emerged on what had happened on the No 30. Terence Mutasa, a staff nurse at University College hospital, treated two passengers, young women in their twenties, for minor injuries and shock. 'They were saying some guy came and sat down on the bottom deck and that he exploded,' he said. 'They said the guy sat down and the explosion happened. They thought it was a suicide bomber.' Ayobai Bello, 43, a security guard, left his bank to cross Tavistock Road when it was flooded with commuters coming down from Euston. He saw the explosion and the top and back ripped off the bus. It was a scene of carnage. 'All I could think was, they are all dead. I saw all this with my own eyes. In front of me in the road was a woman but there were no arms and there were no legs, it was just her body and her head, and body parts were scattered everywhere. There were also two men on the floor, one in blue trousers and one in a shirt, they were both dead. They were both gone. The man I saw hanging dead from the bus, he was a very old man with white hair. He was about 80.' Hours later, in the streets around the bus, the atmosphere was eerie. Hotels and businesses were evacuated and scores of people trailed trolley suitcases behind them. There were no raised voices. Everyone was being most kind to one another. • 7/7 as it happened — by the reporter who covered it for a month The Friends House opened its doors to the displaced in Euston. Its corridors were lined with people wrapped in silver foil to keep warm. It provided refreshments, a quiet room for prayer, and large area where everyone gathered to listen to the radio. There was no hubbub. People just sat. A few seemed to be crying, privately. Others gathered in groups in doorways or in foyers of the large university buildings that dot this part of London. They stood around televisions to watch the news. Looking at the bus, from the police cordon, I knew that in hours it would become a shrine.
Telegraph
19-06-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Maintenance isn't sexy, but Farage on the other hand ...
There was an odd conjunction of stories in Thursday's papers as the European Space Agency declared its goal of establishing a 'plentiful habitat' for humans on Mars within 15 years, while the UK Government admitted that it had stopped trying to guess when trains will ever run on HS2, a project that began (check notes) 15 years ago. Perhaps by 2040, the visions will merge and passengers in London will be able to buy plentiful Mars bars as they wait for a cancelled train. But the past 15 years have not been wasted: they managed to move the departure boards at Euston and put them back again when people complained. One small step for man, one giant leap for Network Rail. Despite Britain's recent track record, Darren Jones bounced into the Commons to announce a new 10-year plan for infrastructure. It will cost £725 billion, so with the usual overshoot we can expect that to pass £2 trillion and involve three potholes being filled and a new light in the gents at Victoria. Yet the chief secretary to the Treasury was full of aspiration and ambition. He is fond of alliteration and promised to go 'further and faster' and act more 'effectively and efficiently' than the Tories. Tall, bespectacled, with a neatly parted hairstyle and a slightly unsettling grin (imagine him played by Mark Gatiss), Jones is not a man who lacks belief. Asked by Jerome Mayhew, a Norfolk Tory, how he could be confident of delivering better value than the last Labour government got under PFI (private finance initiative), he merely replied: 'I am usually confident in my abilities.' He is armed with a 'new online infrastructure pipeline' (not quite ready) and a new acronym: Nista, which stands for the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority. I noted that it was formed on April Fool's Day. 'That's a very shiny title,' sneered John Cooper, Tory MP for Dumfries and Galloway, who said it would be met with an 'eye-rolling sigh'. Jones replied that he had closed two bodies before creating it. 'So it's actually down one,' he said, flashing his fingers to show that he can count. A rare moment in infrastructure planning when a number falls. As more attacks flew in from Welsh and Scottish MPs, who felt they weren't getting enough of the pie, the suave chief secretary showed a touch of exasperation. 'You might want to be a little more grateful,' Jones told David Chadwick, a Lib Dem from Brecon. Generally, though, he was tiggerish, not only about building things but keeping them from falling down. 'Maintenance isn't sexy,' he said, 'but it's really important.' Maintaining a Labour government especially. Speaking of sexy, Richard Tice had risen during the business statement earlier to cry 'phwoar' about his party leader. This is the weekly session when MPs can ask for a debate on any topic under the sun and the Government will pretend (or not) that it cares. Its purpose is to generate tweets and press releases for MPs to send to their local papers about whatever is dominating their postbag. The Skegness Standard will note, therefore, that of all the subjects that its Reform MP could have brought up, he chose Nigel Farage being named Britain's sexiest male politician in a poll for an infidelity dating website. Tice asked Lucy Powell, the leader of the House, to join him in congratulating Farage on being the philanderers' pin-up and also Angela Rayner, who won the women's category. 'Does she recommend that they have dinner together?' he asked. Powell pursed her lips and replied that, tempting offer though it was, she suspected that the Deputy Prime Minister would be washing her hair every night from here to eternity. There's more chance of getting a bypass built on time.
Daily Mail
19-06-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
ROSS CLARK: The farce of HS2 shows how Whitehall has allowed waste and fraud to flourish on an industrial scale
Year by year, the tale of HS2 grows more wretched. The latest report on the fiasco, by James Stewart, former chief executive of Crossrail, depicts contractors behaving like a gang that tarmacs driveways taking advantage of an octogenarian widow. Endless wheezes have been devised to drive up costs, with HS2 Ltd – the government-owned company set up to handle the project – seemingly too gullible to prevent itself from being ripped off. Some of what has gone on, according to the report, may constitute outright fraud. Contracts were signed off even before aspects of the design were decided upon, effectively giving expensive additions a blank cheque. An elaborate remodelling of Euston station was abandoned, but not before £250 million was blown on design work. It beggars belief not that a firm charged £20,000 to make a model station out of Lego, but that HS2 paid it. In all, costs have been inflated by an astonishing £37 billion since 2012. To put that into context, Rachel Reeves ' eye-watering tax rises in last October's budget were supposed to raise an extra £40 billion. The culture at HS2 is prodigal and woe betide any miser who tries to spoil the party. When risk assessor Stephen Cresswell raised concerns that the ballooning HS2 bill was 'actively misrepresented', he was soon shown the door in 2022. He took the firm to an employment tribunal and was this month awarded £319,000 compensation. His condemnation afterwards was withering: 'HS2 is not an organisation that should be trusted with public money.' And yet, we give it more public money. While the official estimate for its final cost is between £45 billion and £54 billion, many fear it will cost more than £100 billion. One of the many ways in which the project was misconceived from the start was that it was needlessly designed to be the fastest train service in the world, even though all the cities it connected were less than 200 miles apart. Consequently, far more earthworks were required and far more properties had to be demolished than if the line was built for a lower speed. Even at its original estimate, HS2 was going to cost, per mile, multiples of what the high-speed line from Paris to Strasbourg – its first phase was completed in 2007 – cost. It is bizarre that then-prime minister David Cameron and chancellor George Osborne waved through HS2 as a fully taxpayer-funded project in 2012 at the same time they were taking a scythe to public services to try to close Gordon Brown's gargantuan spending deficit. In their hubris, they imagined that Whitehall would make a better fist of HS2 than was made of HS1 – the line from London St Pancras to the Channel Tunnel – which was built with private money and sailed over its budget by around 20 per cent. An HS2 worker stands in front of tunnel boring machine Karen at the Old Oak Common station box site during preparations for completing the 4.5 mile HS2 tunnelling to London Euston How could they have not noticed the lousy record of cost control in almost everything run by the state? Time and time again, we find ourselves paying through the nose for things that other countries seem able to build for far less. Just look at the Stonehenge tunnel, a billion-pound project that has been 30 years in the making but was cancelled last year because of its mushrooming costs. And the less said about a third runway at Heathrow, the better. While other countries build things, we spend billions talking about it, holding endless inquiries, backtracking and redesigning the whole thing. We are about to go through the whole tortuous process again with the construction of Sizewell C. Like HS2, the Suffolk nuclear power plant follows a similar private sector project – in this case, the Hinkley C station in Somerset, which has itself been delayed and overrun its budget. Even by nuclear reactor standards, its design is complex, as the same plants in Finland and Normandy have proved with 14-year and 12-year delays, respectively. It's little wonder that the private sector judged Sizewell to be too risky, but that has not stopped the Government ploughing taxpayer money into the scheme in the deluded belief that, yet again, the public sector will manage it better. Don't believe it. Private enterprise doesn't always manage things well, but at least it has a strong incentive to keep a lid on costs and avoid extravagance. Let spending spiral out of control and you can crash your company – taking your bonus and pension with it. In the public sector, on the other hand, you just run off to the Treasury with a begging bowl, assured that the Government has invested so much of its political capital in it that it won't be brave enough to pull the plug. That is what has happened with HS2. Contractors know that ministers are desperate to get the project over the line, and behave accordingly. We are never going to solve the problem of infrastructure unless we first tackle the culture of the public sector. Public officials need proper incentives and penalties pegged to performance, and have it drummed into them that they are spending our money, not a bottomless pit of funds. Yet introducing a dash of private-sector dynamism into Whitehall is anathema to this Labour administration more concerned with union demands that civil servants continue to run the country from their sofas. Rachel Reeves sees spending on infrastructure as key to future growth, but with more projects on the horizon – such as building small modular nuclear reactors and updating the National Grid – there's little hope that these won't become very expensive millstones around the taxpayer's neck.
