Stuart Brown

@flickhwilliams @wonderfullyarty It would be really bad to if you were #disabled, #blind or a partially sighted person reliant on the bus to get to work and could not get on for any reason. Labour need to get transport working before they can push #disabled people into work.

@wonderfullyarty Exactly that. In our recent debate about bus gates, a respected Civic organisation (clue there) was arguing that every BB holder should be required to apply with why they needed reasonable adjustment exemption. They just haven’t a clue about our lived reality.

A wheelchair using friend had a bus access refusal & was left behind in scorching 26 degree heat with no shade 🥵 Bus was empty apart from woman with child in pushchair in the wheelchair space whom driver did not ask to move. I’m coming for you again First Bus.

What a busy morning. If you did nothing wrong you would not have met @newdawn75 at today’s Exchanging Places event by @CityPolice @cityoflondon. For those who spoke with Sarah & her colleagues, thank you for listening & engaging with us. Next time please stop for the red light.

"Let me be clear: the whistleblowers who have put the national interest over their own careers should be celebrated for their courage and their integrity not denigrated. So, will the government finally get a grip on this?" Shadow Energy Sec @ClaireCoutinho asks an Emergency Question on the National Energy System Operator and summer blackout risks.

Summer holidays – yay! Or isn’t it? For #deaf people, travel can be stressful. Delays, cancellations and emergency announcements are often shared by audio only leaving us the last to know. It's 2026, there are technology that exists to fix this. Travel providers should be using mobile alerts, captions and visual notifications so deaf people get information at the same time as everyone else. lnkd.in/p/emmjnMfN

🔥 WHO BENEFITS FROM THE INVASION AND DESTRUCTION OF BRITAIN? Look at this. Small boats keep coming. Our towns are changing. Our culture is under pressure. The EU. That’s why France won’t stop the boats. They’re happy to offload the chaos onto us while they stay safe. Britain is being sold out. Time to wake up and put Britain first. No more excuses.

Cyclist sues council after seriously injuring himself by hitting lane dividers which were installed to improve cyclist safety. itv.com/news/london/20…

This news story about a council’s refusal to install a ramp for a disabled person in Bristol highlights why we need more purpose-built wheelchair user homes, which would reduce the need for costly adaptations. → lnkd.in/emJg_RBf

Early start today in London working with colleagues and other stakeholders on road safety in @cityoflondon @CityPolice. Will share more later. Looking forward to a productive event and talking to lots of people.

TFL & Sadiq Khan needs to pull their belt in, stop funding wasteful & disruptive schemes & get rid of all these expensive deputy Mayors . There's a start in your cost cutting exercise !

Ed Miliband's reported North Sea u-turn was not prompted by pensioner energy poverty, record-high energy costs, or alleged government suppression of blackout risk warnings, but by personal ambition for the Treasury... Watch in full below 👇 youtu.be/_UHh2v30ghg

Labour anything to damage Great Britain, once these orchards are gone we will have to import more food making someone else wealthy, generate emissions importing food on top of those the data centre will produce and all this for very few jobs.

Rachel Reeves has said that the EU is Britain’s most important ally. Would our most important ally keep sending boats over the Channel? Would our most important ally’s court strongman British judges into allowing migrants to settle here in the UK? The actions of the EU suggest anything but an alliance. Labour lets Britain be exploited.

Are large solar farms being built in the wrong places? 🤔

@NetZeroWatch Thank god we left the EU, £72billion for seascape decimation, landfill waste when blades need replacing and intermittent electricity when the wind blows. What a waste of public money. We need a sensible energy policy without massive subsidies driving up the cost of electricity.

The European Commission has signed off on a €63bn French support scheme for offshore wind, giving Paris the green light to push ahead with one of Europe’s largest fixed-price clean power programmes. The package will support the construction and operation of 11 offshore wind farms across the North Sea, the Atlantic, and the Mediterranean over a 25-year period. More Net Zero subsidies... #CostOfNetZero

Reeves says the UK should be “included not excluded” in the EU by default… Is she not aware that the British people voted to leave the bloc? Spain can now inspect RAF aircraft and board British warships stationed in Gibraltar. Britain will also have to notify Spain of any movement of weapons to the strategically vital military base. Britain gives away its sovereignty and becomes weaker and weaker under Labour. All to gratify a corrupt, mega-bureaucracy.

'Cycle street' journeys may have been half of what was claimed, data shows + secret payments using taxpayers’s money…(and I bet this is the tip of the iceberg) Will anyone be held accountable? @heidi_labour @appgcw @walkwheelcyclet @activetraveleng cambridge-news.co.uk/news/cambridge…

Andy Burnham has promised Labour MPs a big reduction in outsourcing, reports the FT. The so-called "insourcing" attack on competitively tendered services has been driven by public sector unions. It means cancelling competition for the provision of services such as cleaning, security, & buildings maintenance & building up a permanent public sector unionised workforce instead. The evidence is overwhelming that the competitive tendering of these services achieves large efficiency savings. A wide range of academic & Govt. studies have confirmed significant cost saving as a result of competitive tendering, usually in the 20% to 30% range. Hartley & Huby (1985) found 26% savings in cleaning services; Domberger, Meadowcroft & Thompson (1986) estimated average cost savings of around 20%; Knox & Young (1995), found that the average cost saving in Northern Ireland from tendering refuse collection was 25%; & Syzmanski (1996) found that average refuse collection costs had fallen by 22% when compared with the last full year before competitive tendering. In 1987 the Audit Commission investigated the experience of competitive tendering in three areas – refuse collection, vehicle maintenance and repairs/improvements to council houses – and found that costs were higher for services not subjected to competition; and that significant cost savings would accrue to all local authorities if they could obtain through competition performance equivalent to the top 25% of local authorities. Cost savings would be: – house maintenance – 20% – vehicle management – 25% – refuse collection – 15%. Their report gave a number of examples to show why competition led to cheaper prices. “Costs of rewiring varied between £218 and £396 per dwelling for private contractors. The cost for work not subject to competition averaged about £600 per dwelling.” In 1996 it was revealed that fees paid under market-tested commissions in 1992–93 for property/estate services were “some 40% less” than the rates charged the previous year under Property Services Agency supply-and-service arrangements. A 2019 Institute for Government report found that "Outsourcing has worked best in ‘support services’ that are relatively simple to contract for and deliver: waste collection, cleaning, catering and maintenance. When these services were first outsourced in the 1980s and 1990s, it delivered large savings, often around 20% of annual operating costs, mostly while maintaining levels of quality". It is exactly these support services that Labour wants to bring back in-house. As the Institute for Government commented in its 2019 report, "It is doubtful that if provision were returned entirely to government hands it would deliver the levels of efficiency currently achieved while competitive pressures remain from private services. Bringing swathes of services back into government hands by default risks throwing away the significant benefits that outsourcing can deliver". The insourcing policy was part of Corbyn's 2019 election manifesto & it was estimated then that the total cost to taxpayers would be £12 billion, increasing over time. It is sad that Burnham has taken up this costly, retrograde & discredited Corbynista policy. Taxpayers will have to pay more for worse services.

The result of Miliband's policy, we need investment in the uk to create job, Labour want jobs to force #disabled people into but because of record energy prices investment is being cut. There's nothing coordinated with Labour policies, that explains why they are failing.

@flickhwilliams @benn_elisbenn @wonderfullyarty As a blue badge holder not living in York, am I not welcome in York?

@benn_elisbenn @wonderfullyarty They wanted every local BB holder to have to justify their need to use that route. They didn’t want non local BBH to be able to use the route at all. So many potential legal challenges in all of that it makes your head spin 🤣 Completely clueless on the law.