Test drive electric cars for free at Hull EV event

Free test drives of electric cars are on offer at Hull and East Yorkshire's first electric vehicle (EV) experience event.Let's Go Electric takes place at the Priority Park & Ride site, just off the A63, between 10:00 and 15:00 BST on Saturday 21 June. Organised by Hull City Council, East Riding of Yorkshire Council and Let's Experience Electric, the event is part of both authorities' electric vehicle strategies, which aim to increase the number of people using EVs.The councils said the event would demonstrate the growing range of cars and commercial electric vehicles along with electric buses and eBikes.
Industry experts will answer questions about the latest advancements in EV technology, including charging infrastructure.Exhibits will include electric vehicles from both local councils and emergency services, an electric bus, e-bikes and an electric truck. Councillor Paul West, cabinet member for environment and transport at East Riding of Yorkshire Council, said: "This event is a fantastic opportunity for anyone interested to find out more about electric vehicles and all the benefits they bring."Councillor Mark Ieronimo, cabinet portfolio holder for transportation, roads and highways at Hull City Council, said: "Making your next car an EV won't be right for everyone but the growing range of vehicles now available at different price points as well as the advancements in battery technology are making them increasingly accessible."Test drives need to be booked in advance and those taking part will need to bring a valid UK photo card driving licence and their National Insurance number.They will also need a printed copy of their personal driving licence check and their reference code which can be created here. Listen to highlights from Hull and East Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, watch the latest episode of Look North or tell us about a story you think we should be covering here.

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

Daily Mail​

10 minutes ago

• Daily Mail​

Real life 'Wolf Of Wall Street' corrupt City boss who remains on the run is ordered to pay back £64million after Ponzi-style scam

A City boss compared to the Wolf Of Wall Street has been ordered to pay back £64million over his role in a gigantic Ponzi-style investment scam, prosecutors said. Anthony Constantinou remains on the run after he fled the UK during his trial at London 's Southwark Crown Court in June 2023. He was found guilty of seven counts of fraud by false representation, fraudulent training and money laundering and convicted in his absence to 14 years imprisonment. Constantinou enjoyed a playboy lifestyle, driving a fleet of flash motors and riding around on a superbike branded the logo of his company, Capital World Markets (CWM). The 41-year-old crook spent millions on sponsorship deals designed to make CWM appear successful and draw in potential clients. He duped hundreds of investors out of a total of £70million between 2013 and 2015 while he ran Capital World Markets (CWM). A spokesman for City of London Police said a confiscation order was made against him on Thursday for the sum of £64 million, which is payable within three months. Police released photographs of some of the luxury vehicles Constantinou spent his fraudulent money on, including a Porsche, Range Rover and luxury motorbike. They previously said he was thought to be in Turkey or Dubai after being stopped in Bulgaria with a fake Spanish passport. CWM had high-profile sponsorship deals with sports events or teams including the Honda Moto GP, Chelsea Football Club, Wigan Warriors rugby league club, Cyclone Boxing Promotions and the London Boat Show. The seven-week trial heard how Constantinou spent £2.5million of investors' money on his 'no expense spared' wedding on the Greek island of Santorini in September 2014, while his son's first birthday party a few days earlier cost more than £70,000. More than £470,000 was paid for private jet hire to fly him and his associates to Moto GP races across Europe as well as a return flight to Nice for a 150,000-euro five-day yacht cruise around the Mediterranean to Monaco. The firm paid £200,000 a quarter to rent 'plush' offices in the City's Heron Tower, while nearly £600,000 was spent on just six months' rent of his large home in Hampstead, north-west London, where his luxury cars were parked in the drive. Promised returns of 60 per cent each year on risk-free foreign exchange (FX) markets, a total of 312 investors trusted their money to CWM. Some were professionals but most were individuals who handed over their life savings or pension pots, with a large number of Gurkhas paying into the scheme, said prosecutor David Durose KC. Constantinou denied wrongdoing but was found guilty of one count of fraud, two counts of fraudulent trading and four counts of money laundering and sentenced to 14 years in prison in his absence. Adrian Foster, of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), said: 'This was a callous scam targeting members of the public. Many people lost their hard-earned money because of Constantinou's greed and false promises in this fake investment scheme. 'We continue to pursue the proceeds of crime robustly with the City of London Police, where we identify available assets to disrupt and deter large-scale frauds like this case. 'In the last five years, over £478million has been recovered from CPS obtained confiscation orders, ensuring that thousands of convicted criminals cannot profit from their offending. £95 million of that amount has been returned to victims of crime, by way of compensation.' Constantinou has been photographed socialising with Princess Beatrice and showing Princess Anne around his company premises after agreeing to sponsor the London Boat Show in 2015. Constantinou was previously jailed for a year at the Old Bailey in 2016 after being found guilty of sexually assaulting two women during after-work drinks. One of the victims described how the parties were just like the raucous scenes depicted in Martin Scorsese's The Wolf Of Wall Street, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as rogue New York trader Jordan Belfort. The court heard that in October 2014, Constantinou pushed a woman up against the frosted glass of the reception area and went on to grope and kissed her against her will. Then in February 2015, he assaulted another woman during drinks after a business meeting. During the meeting, Constantinou threw her mobile against a wall and told her: 'Don't answer phones in my meeting.' Constantinou was three years old when his fashion tycoon father Aristos was gunned down in his Bishop's Avenue mansion in 1985. The unsolved case was dubbed the 'Silver Bullet Murder' due to the six nickel-jacketed bullets that ended Aristos's rags-to-riches life. One of Constantinou's investors spoke to Mail Online in 2023 about his boss' appetite for bad behaviour. The man, who first met Constantinou in 2014, said: 'He put out this image of himself as being hyper successful and I think essentially that's what I fell for. 'Initially I had dismissed the whole thing as too good to be true but I saw so much evidence of it being genuine that I convinced myself that it was. I should have listened to my gut. 'I thought essentially if this is a scam he wouldn't have gone to this much effort. It was very elaborate and there were a lot of people involved. 'The clever thing he did was he did actually have a properly regulated FX business in London but he ran the Ponzi alongside it - that was quite clever. 'So seeing the office, his house, the chauffeur driven Rolls Royce he got around in and all these sponsorship deals - it did all look very genuine. 'If Chelsea are being sponsored by them and he's meeting showing Princess Anne and showing her round the office it feels legit.' After a few meetings with Constantinou and his CWM colleagues in 2014, it was agreed that the businessman would invest £140,000 and work with the company to set up a Dubai base. It was while working alongside Constantinou in his 'Wolf of Wall Street' style trading floor, that he saw how difficult, volatile and untrustworthy the fraudster could be. He continued: 'Every single business meeting - and I mean every single one - he would force everyone in the meeting to drink. 'It was always the same, Grey Goose vodka mixed with orange and cranberry juice and he'd force everyone to stay and get drunk. 'The drinking would start from 2pm in the afternoon and go on until 10 or 11 at night and it was every single meeting, every day. 'He was like a spoiled child king. Nobody could leave these sessions or he'd have a tantrum and lose his s***. 'A few hours in he'd be absolutely wasted, so he'd be doing stupid, weird stuff like throwing things across the office to annoy people or smashing doors. He was a pretty nasty piece of work.' According to the investor, opting out of Constantinou's demands wasn't a choice as his paranoid, controlling and spiteful nature leaked into the entourage of underlings he kept at his heels. He said: 'His entourage was Stalin-esque. He kept his circle close and everyone just did as he said for fear of reprisals. 'He was a moody child who would fly off the handle for basically any reason. You always had to tell him what he wanted to hear. 'He had a Telegram group where he sent good morning messages. He expected every single person to reply with either a thumbs up emoji or a muscle emoji - if you didn't, he would lose his s***. 'One of his assistants would then phone you up and say: 'Listen, you have to reply to him in the Telegram group, he's going mad and smashing stuff up in the office.'

BBC News

20 minutes ago

• BBC News

Some refuse workers will lose money

The leader of Birmingham City Council has admitted for the first time some refuse workers will lose money under plans to reform the workers who are members of Unite the Union have been in a stand-off with the Labour-run council over proposed changes to roles and pay, since January. In an exclusive interview with the BBC, council leader John Cotton said he "absolutely understood" there would be "implications for individuals", but the authority had to "implement job evaluation fairly across the council". Unite claims 170 workers face an annual pay cut of £8,000, but the authority has said only 17 members of staff lose up to £6,000 - something Cotton had not acknowledged publicly. Cotton stressed that the council continued to negotiate with Unite in order to find a "reasonable settlement" to "reflect the workforce's concerns".He denied claims from Unite that the deal to end the dispute had been "watered down" and said the authority had provided a "fair and reasonable offer", which was being discussed by arbitration body Acas. All-out strike action in the city began on 11 March and rubbish has continued to pile up on streets, but securing a legal injunction in May enabled more bin lorries to to be brought in to clear the mountains of bin bags."Regarding the city as a whole, since we secure the injunction and have been able to deploy our available fleet we have collected 33,498 tonnes and average 1,288 per day which includes weekends," a spokesperson for the city council said."We have cleared the backlog so are now able to continue to implement our contingency plan, providing residents with one collection each week." 'Avoid repeating mistakes' The leader of the Labour-run authority described the situation as "incredibly frustrating" and said it continued to urge Unite to accept the offer it had placed on the table. "This strike needs to end so we can carry on with transforming the waste service and ensuring everyone gets the services they're entitled to," Cotton the council leader added that he had "set some straight red lines" to avoid "repeating some of the mistakes that happened in the past"."We have had to take a look at the grading of the driver roles, that is part of the process we have signed up to together with the trade unions, it is a recognised methodology for evaluating jobs."He said a negotiated settlement was "in everyone's interest" and it would allow the council to "get back to the business of improving the waste service in the city". Follow BBC Birmingham on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.

The Sun

27 minutes ago

• The Sun

Energy costs are killing our industries and communities… and they'll kill Labour too unless they bring them down

THE steelworks, chemical plants and paper mills that criss-cross our country are the lifeblood of so many communities across the UK, providing good jobs and supporting local economies. Work in these plants can often be tough. But they are highly-skilled, well-paid and secure jobs for people to work in throughout their careers. 5 5 5 A hard day's work is rewarded with the knowledge your graft is going into producing valuable goods for some of the nation's most needed goods, such as the steel for our warships, chemicals used in the production of antibiotics for cancer treatments, or indeed the paper for your daily newspaper. These sectors provide a sense of pride and place to communities. Think of the smoke piling from the furnace towers at the steelworks in Scunthorp e, or the cranes stretching over Port Talbot. Images that define towns, giving them a part in the story of our complex modern world. Greasy spoon And it's not just the people directly employed in these factories and the wider supply chain that are dependent on the factories and manufacturing sites. The family-run greasy spoon that fuels workers before a long shift. The kids' football club sponsored by the local plant. The local pub where workers congregate after a busy week. Without our industrial sector, the bedrocks of communities wouldn't exist. But new research from the Jobs Foundation finds these roles are at risk. In 1999, the UK had the fourth-largest industrial base in the world, with more than four million workers. Today, the UK has just the 11th largest. In this period, we have gone from more than four million people employed in the manufacturing sector, to just two and a half million, with little growth in value added over the past 30 years. Steel production has fallen from 12million tonnes in 2013 to 4million in 2024. Last of Redcar steelworks demolished with 105,000 tonnes of steel brought down in 30 seconds- Between 2021 and 2024, chemical output has fallen by 40 per cent, and aluminium and paper mills have been shuttered. We've been through this before. In the Eighties, the Thatcher government oversaw a dramatic turnaround in the economic fortunes of the UK. But in this process of national economic revival, certain communities, such as those centred around coal mines, were devastated. Not enough thought was put into the transition. And this is a mistake which we risk repeating today. UK factories and plants pay more than three times as much for their energy as similar users in Germany, and seven times the cost paid by businesses in France. This time, deindustrialisation isn't happening as part of a coherent economic strategy. Instead, high energy prices are allowing us to sleepwalk into the decimation of UK industry. Everyone is now familiar with the spike in energy costs in recent years, with the energy price cap for households. But the situation is even worse for industrial users. UK factories and plants pay more than three times as much for their energy as similar users in Germany, and seven times the cost paid by businesses in France. With these costs, it's no wonder that industrial output across the UK continues to dwindle, simply unable to compete with cheaper production costs overseas. And as our competitiveness falls away, so too do the good jobs that energy-intensive industries provide. We also mustn't forget that energy costs are crippling other sectors too. Empty shops fill high streets, as hospitality and retail businesses can't keep up with the ever-increasing cost of keeping the lights on. 5 And we aren't creating good new jobs in the sectors of the future like AI and data centres, because they also require a lot of energy to operate. There is much talk about how new, clean energy will provide us with abundant energy, lower prices and a host of good new jobs. Roll the dice Promises of new jobs in clean energy are just that: Promises. Promises that might come in the future, but might not. Jobs across heavy industry exist in the present, and time has taught us that once these jobs go, they don't come back. We must do everything that we can to protect them. If Labour wants to have a chance of holding these seats at the next election, the upcoming industrial strategy must include concrete policies to bring energy costs down. Since the last election, Labour MPs represent the vast majority of seats where our industrial bases are located. But that could quickly change. Our research shows Nigel Farage and Reform is poised to sweep the majority of constituencies that are most reliant on jobs in energy-intensive industries at the next election. And who could blame voters in these constituencies, watching jobs in their local areas at risk through no fault of their own, for wanting to roll the dice with Reform. If Labour wants to have a chance of holding these seats at the next election, the upcoming industrial strategy must include concrete policies to bring energy costs down. This is in the country's best interests too. Industry gives purpose to communities, dignity to workers, and protects our national security. Let's do our part to protect it. 5