Millions to hit the roads for Easter getaways as Port of Dover boss says firm ‘back on top’ of backlogs

Published

1 year ago

March 29, 2024

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The Easter getaway has started, with 2.6 million car journeys expected on the nation’s roads today.

Good Friday is likely to be the busiest day for travel during the Easter break, with the number of car journeys higher than the two million expected on Easter Monday and the 2.3 million forecast for Saturday and Sunday.

Some 20,000 cars are expected to travel through the Port of Dover between Thursday and Easter Monday and the port’s chief executive Doug Bannister said Storm Nelson had already presented challenges.

“We suffered a bit of a backlog overnight because of the weather impacting on sailings,” he told Sky News on Friday morning, “but we’ve got back on top of it”.

He said tourist vehicles were taking around two hours to get through the port’s border controls, but this was likely to improve as crowds thinned out from mid-afternoon.

Ferry firm Stena Line said bookings on Irish Sea routes are up 26% on Easter weekend 2023.

Travel trade organisation Abta said airports are reporting “strong numbers”, with 175,000 due to leave from Stansted, 105,000 from Luton, 160,000 from Manchester, 79,000 from Birmingham, and 89,000 from Edinburgh between Friday and Monday.

Turkey, Dubai and the Canary Islands are the most popular destinations abroad and trips to Dublin are also in demand.

Manchester Airport managing director Chris Woodroofe said expected passenger numbers there were up 7% on the same time last year.

Glasgow predicts more than 90,000 passengers over the four days while Birmingham Airport said it expects a 27.2% increase in departures compared to last year’s Easter period.

Bristol predicts 30,000 holiday trips on Easter Sunday alone, and Liverpool Airport expects around 60,000 passengers over the four days – around 7% higher than last year.

There were no reports of major delays at airports or on rail, although some rail lines – such as the West Coast Main Line between London Euston and Milton Keynes – are closed for engineering or construction work.

On the roads, the M5 southbound between Bristol and Taunton, and the M3 between the M25 and the south coast were expected to be the most congested.

Weather-wise, the weekend is likely to be unsettled, with a mix of sunshine and blustery scattered showers on Friday, with a risk of thunderstorms in the southeast, the Met Office said.

Deputy chief meteorologist Dan Harris said: “The weather is expected to gradually improve following the widely unsettled spell of the past few days, with a fairly typical mix of spring-like weather across the UK.

“There will be some sunshine, and it will feel increasingly warm for most as the winds become lighter.

“However, the west and especially southwest is likely to see passing showers too, which could be quite heavy and frequent at times.

“Eastern coastal districts are also likely to feel increasingly cold as an onshore breeze develops, threatening persistent low cloud in some areas too.”

UK

Rachel Reeves hints at tax rises in autumn budget after welfare bill U-turn

Published

3 hours ago

July 5, 2025

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Rachel Reeves hints at tax rises in autumn budget after welfare bill U-turn

Rachel Reeves has hinted that taxes are likely to be raised this autumn after a major U-turn on the government’s controversial welfare bill.

Sir Keir Starmer’s Universal Credit and Personal Independent Payment Bill passed through the House of Commons on Tuesday after multiple concessions and threats of a major rebellion.

MPs ended up voting for only one part of the plan: a cut to universal credit (UC) sickness benefits for new claimants from £97 a week to £50 from 2026/7.

Initially aimed at saving £5.5bn, it now leaves the government with an estimated £5.5bn black hole – close to breaching Ms Reeves’s fiscal rules set out last year.

In an interview with The Guardian, the chancellor did not rule out tax rises later in the year, saying there were “costs” to watering down the welfare bill.

“I’m not going to [rule out tax rises], because it would be irresponsible for a chancellor to do that,” Ms Reeves told the outlet.

“We took the decisions last year to draw a line under unfunded commitments and economic mismanagement.

“So we’ll never have to do something like that again. But there are costs to what happened.”

Meanwhile, The Times reported that, ahead of the Commons vote on the welfare bill, Ms Reeves told cabinet ministers the decision to offer concessions would mean taxes would have to be raised.

The outlet reported that the chancellor said the tax rises would be smaller than those announced in the 2024 budget, but that she is expected to have to raise tens of billions more.

It comes after Ms Reeves said she was “totally” up to continuing as chancellor after appearing tearful at Prime Minister’s Questions.

Criticising Sir Keir for the U-turns on benefit reform during PMQs, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said the chancellor looked “absolutely miserable”, and questioned whether she would remain in post until the next election.

Sir Keir did not explicitly say that she would, and Ms Badenoch interjected to say: “How awful for the chancellor that he couldn’t confirm that she would stay in place.”

In her first comments after the incident, Ms Reeves said she was having a “tough day” before adding: “People saw I was upset, but that was yesterday.

“Today’s a new day and I’m just cracking on with the job.”

Sir Keir also told Sky News’ political editor Beth Rigby on Thursday that he “didn’t appreciate” that Ms Reeves was crying in the Commons.

“In PMQs, it is bang, bang, bang,” he said. “That’s what it was yesterday.

“And therefore, I was probably the last to appreciate anything else going on in the chamber, and that’s just a straightforward human explanation, common sense explanation.”

UK

Diogo Jota and Andre Silva’s funeral in pictures

Published

4 hours ago

July 5, 2025

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Diogo Jota and Andre Silva's funeral in pictures

The family and friends of Diogo Jota and his brother Andre Silva have been joined by Liverpool stars past and present and other Portuguese players at the pair’s funeral near Porto.

The Liverpool forward, 28, and his brother died in a car crash in Spain on Thursday.

Pictures below show the funeral at the Igreja Matriz de Gondomar church in the town of Gondomar near Porto. Click here for our liveblog coverage of the day’s events.

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Miguell Rocha played with Jota for around ten years with Gondomar Sport Clube in Portugal.

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The former captain was seen wiping away tears as he read messages and laid his tribute down.

UK

How Britain’s most notorious gangster turned up at a charity lunch to fact-check a retired detective’s talk

Published

9 hours ago

July 5, 2025

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How Britain's most notorious gangster turned up at a charity lunch to fact-check a retired detective's talk

Britain’s most notorious gangster and the detective who pursued him have been involved in a bizarre confrontation…at a charity lunch.

Former Detective Superintendent Ian Brown was at a Kent golf club and about to give a talk on the infamous £26m Brink’s-Mat gold robbery when he was summoned from the stage by officials.

Mr Brown, who appeared on the award-winning Sky News StoryCast podcast The Hunt For The Brink’s-Mat Gold in 2019, said: “I go outside and they say ‘he’s here’ and I say ‘who’s here’ and they say that table over there in the corner, that’s Kenny Noye with a baseball cap pulled down over his head.”

Noye stabbed to death an undercover policeman during the Brink’s-Mat investigation, but was acquitted of murder, though he was jailed for handling the stolen gold.

After his release, he used a knife again in the M25 road-rage murder of motorist Stephen Cameron.

“They said what are we going to do?” said Mr Brown.

“I said are you serving food? Well, just use plastic knives.”

Although Mr Brown had not personally arrested Noye over Brink’s-Mat he had identified him as a suspect months after the robbery.

Years later he met him during an ill-fated TV interview in which he quizzed him about his role in the robbery.

He said: “He told me everything I wanted to know except the truth. He still insists he had nothing to do with it.”

The interview was never broadcast after the prison authorities threatened to send Noye back to jail for a breach of his parole.

Mr Brown, 86, said: “I went over to him and said ‘thanks for coming, nice of you to pop in’, but I don’t believe you’ve turned up with your sons and grandkids to listen to me telling how you killed a police officer.

“And he said ‘I want to make sure you don’t say I’ve been dealing drugs’ and I said ‘I’ve never said that Kenny’.”

The retired detective told Noye he wasn’t going to change his presentation just because he was there.

“He said ‘mate, I wouldn’t expect you to and I’ll come up [on stage] if you want me to’.

“Can you think how he’s turned up with his family to listen to somebody talking about you killing the police? Now, you put logic on that.”

The bizarre story emerged when I rang Mr Brown after I’d been told about the meeting.

I also wanted to ask him about the recent BBC hit drama series The Gold which retold the story of the Brink’s-Mat heist at Heathrow Airport in 1983.

“It was an absolute shambles, far too much dramatic licence and the real story was so much better,” said the ex-detective, whose job had been to follow the trail of the 6,800 gold bars to the US and the Caribbean.

He said he chatted to one of the show’s writers for a long time in a phone call but then heard no more.

“They invented people, changed a bit here and there and made it politically correct in so many ways. I’m just very sad that that is what people will believe.

“And I couldn’t work out who my character was supposed to be. I could have been one of the female cops.”

He also criticised the portrayal of Noye, now 78, as a likeable jack-the-lad character when the truth about the double killer with a volatile temper was quite different.