3 CHEERS...

...well two anyway for Andrew Adonis the British minister who is showing the same kind of commitment to the job in hand at the Department of Transport that he did when he almost single-handed pushed through the case for academy schools during his time in the Cabinet Office. This week Lord Adonis announced a further advance with the government's railway electrification programme that will benefit the Great Western Main Line from London to South Wales and the intercity line from Manchester to Liverpool. Adonis is very much a hands-on minister; he recently took a week away from the office to make a national rail tour and, while coming back with a sense of a largely modern and punctual train fleet carrying record passenger numbers, he also compiled a little list of things that needed attention. For instance, as he asked in a recent article, why have all of London's terminals put together only a quarter as much cycle parking as a small Dutch city like Leiden? Only one-third of the British rail network is electrified, compared to 100 percent in Switzerland, 69 per cent in Italy and 50 per cent in France.