The University of Hull is to close its chemistry department.

It said student numbers were "so low that these courses are no longer sustainable".

The chemistry department was rated the fourth best in the UK in The Guardian's University Guide 2024. bbc.com/news/articles/… I guess the safe thing to say on twitter is "I think this is really bad, not fine, not good, but really really bad" and not hurt anyone's feelings. Keep it a safe space for the anons and not actually think about this, or think about how we might reverse it if we think it's bad.

"Why Microsoft Excel won’t die" > because it has long been, and remains, the best piece of software ever written. I am always deeply sceptical of Excel haterz. economist.com/business/2024/… Today I used Excel, with a colleague, to collaborate in real time. We checked 400 company to domain name matches together. Perfect synchronisation. Then we calculated the data that went into these graphs. Then we made the graphs. It all worked perfectly. Best software ever.

During Covid we massively boosted NHS funding. It remains high as a percentage of our economy. By some measures (read the article before you rage at me) we've got about 20% more staff delivering no more output. ifs.org.uk/articles/there…


This isn't just an NHS thing. We've got similar stagnant productivity across much of the public and private sector. I focus in detail only on transport. Because no-one can focus on detail beyond a small sector. In transport we can see the inefficiency all around us if we look.

As a Brit I accept that I don't have American style freedom of speech.
But I do have the freedom to hang my washing up outside, unlike most of you Americans with your HOA rules. Gonna cross a road without mechanised permission later. Might even go wild and cross at the crossing while the man is red.

I've written about the successes and failures of Scottish devolution and why it's so popular among Scots. tomforth.co.uk/unreasonablesu… TLDR: it's the economy, stupid. Scotland has outperformed England's since devolution. The overperformance is particularly large in Scottish cities, which have broken out of the productivity trap English cities remain trapped in.

Lots of other good points. Wind farms, free tuition, democracy, etc... but I still think it's the economics that matters most. If Scotland's economy with devolution had performed as badly as Yorkshire's or the West Midlands I think there'd be calls to undo it.

https://twitter.com/mrianleslie/status/1785218932430766441

Of course Scots don't track GDP numbers. But a society can feel it's prosperity. Scots have friends, family, and work in places like Newcastle, Sunderland, Leeds, Bradford, Birmingham, and Wolverhampton. They can feel their relative prosperity and success since devolution.

That Indian railway electrification number seems to check out. Coloured = electrified. Black = not electrified.

Here's the part of Europe with similar population density to North England vs. North England.

"Birmingham City Council has confirmed it will raise council tax by 21% over the next two years as part of £300m budget savings.

Street lights are to be dimmed, waste collections are to become fortnightly, while burial costs will increase."

Ooooof. bbc.co.uk/news/uk-englan… It's the big cuts to social care that'll really cause problems. Probably a lot of costs passed on to the NHS. But it was dimming the streetlights that I think summed up the desperation of it. So good work on the BBC for that write up I reckon.

I'd thought about getting this graph for myself the other day when I was reading about UK public sector productivity. I kept on expecting it would appear but it didn't. I couldn't be bothered. But now Julian's done it and thus I get it for zero effort. Which is high productivity!

https://twitter.com/julianHjessop/status/1726644311721132135

I share Julian's caution around definitions of public sector productivity. Contributing (in a tiny way, via measurements of teacher-assessments of how much kids were learning through online lessons) to some of the education data over Covid deepened that. It is often very hard.

Fine. I'll do the hard arguing. The UK state has too much analytical capacity. And it gets bad outputs from it because it chooses to do the wrong type of analysis which is therefore too hard. And now I'll give a very specific example.

https://twitter.com/Gilesyb/status/1720090838087487719

Around 2017 I started tracking every bus and tram on a high frequency route in Birmingham and used this data to calculate the effective size of the city by public transport at different times of the day. Still to the best of my knowledge, I was first. tomforth.co.uk/birminghamisas…

I employ three people who live in Nottingham. It's useful to get them to come to Leeds a couple of times a week. And it shouldn't be that hard. Nottingham is 60 miles away. Similar distance as, say, Eindhoven to Rotterdam. And both pairs are connected by a direct train,... The scheduled time for the hourly two-carriage diesel train here in North England is 1h57m. Average speed of 31mph. Today four of the fifteen trains were cancelled. Under half arrive anywhere near on time. Average delays are about 15 minutes (if they're not cancelled)

In 2015 I wrote quite a cynical piece about HS2 in which I argued that it was probably all about using Manchester and Leeds to build a business case for increasing rail capacity between Milton Keynes and London. And actually it wasn't cynical enough. Lesson learned I suppose. Be more cynical.

We did a capitalism. 💪🇬🇧📈 prolificnorth.co.uk/news/10m-valua… Next funding round should be 2025 when we're firmly established using our unique AI techniques (now thankfully copied from my brain to both GitHub and the brains of Amanda, James, Dan, Jack, and Fatima) to classify the majority of companies in the world by what they do.

Today I'm going to read three reports. The common theme is that I was very politely invited to contribute (by some combinations of @eveyroo, Lindsay Judge, and @TorstenBell respectively). And attended some meetings of each, which were fascinating, and then my work failed,... So this leaves me in the fascinating position of having seen some of how the sausage has been made (which has been a new and very valuable experience), the internal disagreements, changes of direction, and ultimate output. But I haven't read any of the three reports,...

Went on GB News, said we should spend most of Oxford's research and infrastructure money in Bradford if it continues to refuse to grow. We can't keep propping up failing places forever. Agglomeration is real. Small isolated places with a huge reliance on the public sector which refuse to grow like Oxford and Cambridge might not be as good a long-term bet as places in huge city regions like Bradford, Huddersfield, Oldham, Rochdale, Wolverhampton, and Walsall.

Gonna read this. And let you know what it says. https://t.co/SMZ28q1LgQdemocracy.greatermanchester-ca.gov.uk/documents/s280…
"At present, buses are not delivering to their potential. We are taking our bus system into public control through bus franchising. For the first time, we can plan routes, set affordable fares and integrate buses into our transport system: the Bee Network." > such good writing.

I wrote about data and digital services and why I think they're not currently delivering better and more productive government. TLDR: it's because we've sacrificed most of the gains to centralisation. oecdcogito.blog/2023/07/19/dec… And sneakily, over the past three months where I've been writing this piece I've been collecting more and more and more examples of where centralised digital services with loads of data are delivering really poor results. Just really visibly low productivity and inefficiencies.

I'm going to have to do the real "productivity above UK average" and "productivity below UK average" map aren't I. Which measure of "productivity" do you want?

I read the government's announcement of it cancellation of investment without which North Britain's railway can never run properly. But I've decided to do a positive tweet about it instead of continuing that moan. gov.uk/government/new… The quote from Andy Burnham's office is fantastic work. Has positive vibes but isn't, actually, if you read it, positive.

Neither the Netherlands nor the Randstad are particularly high density compared to North England. No Dutch city is as large or as densely populated as Manchester. tomforth.co.uk/circlepopulati…

At this very moment, a few people in Newport, South Wales and due to excellent recent reforms to the UK's official statistics release process almost no-one else know a single number that will upon its release tomorrow cause hours of simultaneous radio and TV ranting. There it is. Loaded up on the server already. I wonder what system they use to make it live? Clever bunch at the ONS. I wonder if they use their own RSS feed to do their own website. Probably not. Probably a cron job that runs every minute. ons.gov.uk/releases/longt…