Last year the government committed £80m of public funding to develop new public-private partnership “national colleges” in five key growth areas of the UK economy: High speed rail Nuclear power Digital skills Creative and cultural industries Onshore oil and gas Alongside nuclear power, the National College for Onshore Oil and …

For an economy largely owned by the City of London, the post-Brexit future of UK banking and finance is an existential concern. The conventional wisdom is that unless the UK government can negotiate an agreement with the EU to allow the current passporting arrangements to continue then we will see …

The problem with recessions is that you don’t know you’re in one until it is too late.  That is because nobody actually knows what the economy is doing right now.  We have to wait until government and corporate statisticians compile and analyse the data – a process that can take …

Remember that shiny new multi-billion barrel oil discovery someone found off the coast of Scotland?  It turned out to be a damp squib. This, more or less, has been the story of UK oil and gas for the last decade.  The myth is that there is still a vast quantity of …

We can add hacking to a growing list of threats from the smart meters being rolled out by energy companies around the world. For the time being, the threat is minimal because the smart meters will only send information one-way – providing energy supply companies with our usage information.  But …

Given the number of crowd funding green energy scams that make their way across social media, you would be forgiven for thinking that green technology is in its infancy.  Worryingly, though, there are signs that genuine progress in green technology may be slowing. This, at least, is a concern raised …

Between now and June 8th, the most common question posed by politicians, journalists and drunk men down the pub will be some variant of “how are you going to pay for it?”  From defence spending to international aid and from energy price caps to social care, every electoral promise will …

News that Britain enjoyed its first coal free day since the start of the industrial revolution was broadly welcomed last week.  But check behind the headlines and it is not clear that the UK really was coal-free after all. Most obviously, industrial users including the UK’s steelworks were still burning coal, …

Forget Brexit, it’s much worse than that according to Paul J. Davies at the Wall Street Journal: “Banks in Britain are still languishing in the doldrums brought on by the financial crisis of 2008. Weak banking activity and low investment returns have caused revenue to shrink, leading to widespread cost-cutting …

For individual motorists, the lure of electric vehicles (EVs) is growing by the month.  A 56 percent increase in global EV sales last year is helping to push the price down below that of equivalent petroleum vehicles.  Government grants and tax breaks are also pushing prices down in the short-term.  …