Ben Cope

Britain’s phone signal is a national disgrace. @Jack_Nostalgic and I are launching a campaign to fix it. Watch the video, check out our website, and get involved. There’s lots more to come.

New research shows that poor phone signal is costing us up to £785mn a year in lost consumer welfare. If you, your company, or organisation are fed up with the buffering then we want to hear from you as we devise the fix for this most frustrating problem.

£785 million a year. That’s the direct cost of poor phone signal in the U.K. £260 million in London alone. This is holding the country back. We need to fix it.

sometimes i cannot take the uk seriously. america has reusable rockets going to space. thailand has full 5g in the jungle. qatar airways has starlink at 30,000 feet. meanwhile i pay £140 for a return train ticket and get 1.19 mbps download and 0 upload. this country is not serious.

@NielsHoven The tyranny of merit

This is one of the best essays I’ve ever read, thought-provoking and well-written. Its worth reading in its entirety

Yesterday, @BenHCope wrote for the Spectator about how his own experience of poor phone signal is unfortunately all too common. Some key points: - Britain's phone signal ranks 59th in the world, behind countries like Kazakhstan - It costs the UK up to £7bn a year - A planning system that blocks rather than builds is the key culprit - Buffering Britain is going to fix it.

@Joe___Allen 💯

The new Welsh Government is committed to tackling our problems "at pace". Here is a practical issue they could address quickly. Cardiff's mobile speeds are just 1/3 of the speed of Stockholm's. (123Mbps vs 361Mbps). Largely in our power to sort out.

We spoke to GB News about why Britain's mobile signal is so bad, what it's costing us, and what can be done to fix it.

@ChrisSamson18 The amount of times we lost signal during the filming day was cruelly ironic!

Funnily enough just tried to watch this on a train whilst on WiFi and it still continually buffered and didn’t load.

@DanielJoseph Ha!

This video was unironically buffering as I tried to start playing it!

@maxwell_marlow @BufferingBrit Thanks, Maxwell. Yes, really enjoyed your report. Let’s talk

@BufferingBrit Great initiative- I’ve just done some research into mobile connectivity which you’re welcome to use tyistrategy.co.uk/wp-content/upl…

We're Buffering Britain, and we're going to fix the country's phone signal. Join us.

@Fremond_ Thank you!

This is an excellent project set up by an excellent, excellent man. I can’t load X on my phone when walking through Liverpool Street at peak times. It is absolutely absurd that in many parts of central London, there is no cell service. We are being held hostage by special interest groups. It’s time to expose them.

Britain has worse mobile connectivity than Kazakstan, Peru, and Vietnam. A first world country shouldn't be at the mercy of the buffering wheel. @BenHCope and I are launching a campaign to fix things. Watch the video and check out our website below. Plenty more to come!

‘He is not quite the heavyweight he is being described as.’ Political commentator Ben Cope believes that Andy Burnham is popular with younger voters due to the sense of change he offers and the ‘enthusiasm’ for shaking up politics. 📺 Freeview 236, Sky 512, Virgin 604

@moving_charlie @rcolvile

Please direct me to the real world evidence in the UK that building more homes bring the prices down! I will happily stand corrected if that exists. Because I have only seen evidence of the opposite. As long as debt, Help to Buy etc are freely available, FTB's will willingly borrow every last penny to pay whatever the price tag is. Or they did, but they've stopped now.

Sigh. You start to wonder if they're on the take, or just gaslit.

@Ameer_Kotecha Nice idea. How will this be different to IfG Academy or Civic Future’s Public Leadership Programme?

I’m very pleased to announce today the launch of The Centre for Government Reform. Since leaving government service just a few weeks ago I’ve been struck at how widely people share the view that the government machine is broken. We need radical reform to the state and we need high-calibre outside people to deliver it. The Centre - which I’m launching with Lord Nash and Lord Agnew - will find those people and prepare them for the task at hand. Excited to get started! thetimes.com/uk/politics/ar…

@lukerobertblack @brownliberite Great find

It must have been so weird to pretend they’ve never met

@jackaldane @j_amesmarriott Thanks for flagging this. I’ll check it out!

About four months ago at an event I asked Ian McEwan whether he worried that the decline of literacy might prove harmful to the future of democracy. I don’t exaggerate when I say he didn’t sound worried at all. Hopefully this series with @j_amesmarriott will convince the sceptics that the decline is real, and the consequences potentially very serious. bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0…

We made a blind taste test to see whether NYT readers prefer human writing or AI writing. 86,000 people have taken it so far, and the results are fascinating. Overall, 54% of quiz-takers prefer AI. A real moment! nytimes.com/interactive/20…

@lfg_uk Would LFG or @StudentGrpClaim consider legal action against universities if ‘releasing the files’ showed they misrepresented courses?

The Government has the power to reveal the truth about the system many politicians and experts have spent decades promoting. But so far it has been locked away from the public. The LEO records, intended to "enable parents and students to make more informed choices concerning education and employment destinations", link education records with later outcomes, using earnings and employment data from HMRC, alongside information held by the Department for Work and Pensions. The Government only publishes heavily curated and disclosure-controlled data to the public, giving parents and students access to only a select preset of filtered breakdowns. Some in the sector, like the University Alliance, have denounced the idea that LEO data should be used to ‘provide further indicators in relation to graduate outcomes… [because] salary is a poor measure of value, and even less of a proxy for quality’. But this misses the point. Students were repeatedly told by many politicians and ‘experts’ that going to university was the route to higher pay; to now claim that earnings aren’t a reasonable measure of value is disingenuous for the millions who attended university believing they would find a well-paid job after graduation. Releasing the records will not give those graduates their years back, but it would allow the next generation to make one of their biggest decisions in life with their eyes open. The Government must give us the truth. They must release the records. @pursuitofprog in @CapX today 👇