Bernard Ginns: Time for North to get taste of billions spent on Crossrail

London’s £15.9bn new east-west rail network represents one of the biggest infrastructure projects ever undertaken in the UK.

A quick glance at the delivery company’s website illustrates the truly enormous scale of this ambitious scheme.

Billed as Europe’s biggest construction project, Crossrail is creating tens of thousands of jobs and training opportunities for London and the South-East.

It will stretch from Maidenhead and Heathrow in the west to Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the east and cover 100km of new track, including 21km of new twin-bore rail tunnels.

Crossrail will create eight new stations in London and upgrade many existing stations and provide a direct connection between all of London’s main business centres, linking Heathrow with Paddington, the West End, the City and Canary Wharf.

It will also help further inflate the capital’s property bubble and is expected to increase residential capital values by 20-25 per cent in the areas around Crossrail stations.

Crossrail will change the way people travel around the capital, boosting rail capacity by 10 per cent and cutting service times dramatically across London.

Bully for them. A new train set for the gilded millionaires and their army of slave workers in London town.

Mayor Boris Johnson is already talking about Crossrail 2.

No wonder the capital is leaving the rest of the country behind.

Where are the comparable schemes in the North? Roll on the northern referendum.

SHALL we open a book on the next law firms to merge in the legal sector?

The wave of disruption that has swept through the music industry, traditional media and the high street has finally caught up with the law.

Yorkshire, which is home to one of the most dynamic legal scenes and some of the best legal minds in the country, is on the front line.

New business structures, new technology and client demands are forcing lawyers to change, whether they like it or not.

As Sir Nigel Knowles memorably put it at the Yorkshire Post Business Club: “If you think you’re a member of a profession shrouded in mystique and respect, you’re dead. If you’re in it as a business, you have a chance of prospering.”

The head of the world’s largest commercial law firm says, anecdotally, the financial year to April 2013 was a tough one for many firms. We will see how right he was as the filings hit Companies House.

Meanwhile, I suspect that one of the reasons why we haven’t seen more cranes on the Leeds skyline is the nervousness among the senior legal partners in the city.

One million square foot of lease events are looming on the horizon, but no law firms, bar Shulmans, have committed pen to paper and got spades in the ground.

The consolidation is coming and Leeds will feel it first.

BT SPORT has apologised after football pundit David Ginola made an offensive gesture during a live broadcast.

While I could never condone such behaviour, I must say that as a customer of BT I share his sentiment.

In a previous column, I recounted how straightforward requests for a BT Sport viewing card led to a frustrating and fruitless round of call centres and websites.

After toing and froing with the so-called Executive Level Complaint Department, BT concluded that “on closer inspection, it looks as though the signal from your local transmitter might not be strong enough to carry frequencies for the Sport channel where you live”.

I bluntly pointed out that BT should not sell services that it could not deliver.

BT’s reply could have been drafted by a lawyer. It probably was. The company said: “I must make it clear that BT are in no way responsible for Freeview transmitters and therefore it is unfortunately out of our hands if customers are unable to receive channels whether they be BT Sport or anything else.”

Clearly my fault then. If any readers know of a decent local broadband provider please let me know. And don’t suggest Plusnet, which over-eggs the Yorkshire pudding in its ad campaigns. It’s owned by BT.