Noted on 31 Oct 2026

The Budget had nothing in it for shared or pool fleets by name. Reading the motoring measures together, though, it feels most of them push organisations in the same direction: away from paying staff to drive their own cars, and towards vehicles the organisation owns and shares.

From yesterday, almost a kilometre of Oxford Street is closed to every vehicle except emergency services, with deliveries allowed between midnight and 7am. Buses, taxis, private hire, bikes and pedicabs have all been sent round the corner.

In June the FT reported that Bain has started testing software takeover targets by building rough copies of them. Bain says it has vibecoded hundreds of these replicas since 2023, first with a dedicated team of engineers and now with ordinary consultants, to see whether the code is the defensible part of a business or something else.