Leaders from across the health tech sector predict a year of accelerating digital transformation in the NHS; one that will increasingly be driven by AI. From the development of decision support and robotic surgery to a renewed focus on cybersecurity and data interoperability, Highland Marketing’s clients explore the trends that will shape the future of healthcare this year and beyond.
James Norman is an experienced NHS CIO who now works as EMEA health and life science director for Pure Storage. Speaking as a member of the Highland Marketing advisory board, he said:
“AI decision support is about to become mainstream, and in 2025 we will start to see it embedded in all aspects of healthcare provision.
“Robotic surgery supported by AI will become available through more remote satellite locations, including retail health clinics. While digital GPs for minor ailments will start to supplement current GP services, to reduce demand on services and streamline patient pathways to appropriate care.
“AI will also support the spread of telehealth or remote monitoring using a wide range of tools, including implantable devices, wearables, nanobots, and intelligent everyday systems from toilets to mirrors and surveillance apps, all of which have been maturing over the last few years but are being adopted into everyday life through consumer services.
“In the longer term, all this will have implications for clinical training. The availability of AI decision support will reduce some of the learning requirements for junior doctors. But it will also create new requirements, such as being able to understand and safely use LLMS and AI-driven diagnostic algorithms.
“It will also have implications for suppliers. AI puts huge demands on power supplies and physical space, just as sustainable IT is becoming more and more important to deliver on net zero commitments.
“Smaller, more energy efficient, more powerful capabilities will be required, and we’re already seeing movement in this direction, with partnerships to reduce the energy consumption of chips or create powerful, energy efficient storage arrays.”
Andrew Edge, data and AI lead at leading data transformation consultancy, Simpson Associates, said:
“The notion of AI and relevance for data management will become much more widely adopted within the health sector in 2025, and consequently the phenomenal data and analytical capabilities it will bring.
“Up until now the focus has been driving value from AI by automating back-office tasks and activities, such as extraction of clinical information, which in turn frees up time for care of the patient.
“The NHS has already acknowledged that AI can help deliver better patient outcomes and support its staff. In 2025, its focus must be on ensuring quality and governance, as well as putting the data and AI tools in place to deliver on this opportunity. This enables AI to be utilised beyond task automation and deliver against the key strategic NHS goals including achieving “more with less.”
“The question of interoperability will also continue to be a big challenge as we further develop a general population health approach. The Sudlow Review emphasised that we need to get better at using health data in a multi-agency approach. The good news here is technology enhancements will help achieve this.”
Assad Tabet, senior vice president healthcare and life sciences UKI and Europe, Mastek:
“The government may be developing a 10 Year Health Plan to stabilise and reform the NHS, but in technology I expect to see a continuation of trends that we have already seen.
AI: We are moving into an era in which AI will no longer be a standalone term or solution, but something that is embedded into all new operations and our everyday lives. We have already seen this with the latest versions of Apple iOS and Android devices, which have AI assistants for content creation, summaries and research. This will become the norm in health, as in other areas.
Cyber security: I see more AI services and technologies being used within cyber security services to detect breaches and nullify threats where it can. Healthcare organisations will need to prioritise cyber security services to protect patient data amid increasing digitisation.
Digital mental health: Virtual assistants,digital twins and chatbots will increase access to digital mental health services by making curated and clinically validated information available online for practitioners and patients. More personalised and joined-up services will be tailored to individual needs.
Data interoperability and sharing: Platforms like the Federated Data Platform and secure data environments will be leveraged to create new population health insights and improve overall health outcomes. These platforms will also enable better communication and collaboration between healthcare providers.
Digital prevention: Increased promotionof screening, vaccinations and other preventative services will feature significantly in 2025. We will see national team members working with integrated care systems to identify suitable digital tools and/or therapeutics to implement and support patient cohorts with preventative measures.
“A competitive marketplace where innovators can thrive, and where innovation can flourish for the NHS. That’s the message coming through strongly from the government as 2024 ends and 2025 begins. It’s to be lauded.
“To work effectively it needs to be applied consistently, to ensure that the NHS can harness the full ecosystem of suppliers, and that it isn’t locked in with vendors that have always been used but where development doesn’t reflect the urgency of demand and evolving healthcare service models.
“The diagnostics environment is one part of healthcare fortunate to be relatively digitally mature, with a market for key systems that has benefitted from longevity. Modernising diagnostic imaging also sits at the centre of national commitments.
“The opportunity in 2025 is to work with those suppliers that demonstrate their technological offers are still relevant, and to modernise procurement functions such that new entrants can overcome any remaining complacencies from historic vendors who fail to prove responsiveness to pressures faced at the diagnostic coalface.”
Chris Scarisbrick, deputy managing director for UK and Ireland, for Sectra, said:
“The world is a more dangerous place as we head into 2025 – carrying with it sustained risks for high value targets, healthcare included. Reports that cyber-attacks have “plateaued” have been accompanied by digital health headlines showing the human cost associated with service disruption, delayed care, and even “harm” when systems are compromised.
“The technology sector serving healthcare should therefore be prepared for increasing requirements around cyber credentials in the coming year; and arguably should take a more proactive approach.
“Cloud based provision – which is continuing to grow at pace in diagnostic imaging – can help, where the cyber expertise of large cloud providers can be leveraged in ways not possible on-premises.
“But we must also adopt best practice at every point possible as suppliers – whether that’s compliance with Cyber Essentials Plus, IS027001, or CSA STAR accreditations. Such compliance needs to transcend throughout supply chains – to ensure every link is as strong as it needs to be.
“2024 has been a year of substantial digital progress in healthcare diagnostics. We have a collective duty – across the health service, and as suppliers, to safeguard that progress against cyber adversaries.”
“As 2025 reveals national plans to restore the NHS, leveraging large scale digital transformation will undoubtedly have centre prominence. But opportunities for more rapid and immediate transformation can also be realised through momentum already building within the NHS.
“As 2024 drew to an end, more than 150 NHS organisations had made media services free for patients. Some had done this hospital-wide, others on individual wards. The reason: not only to entertain and distract patients with home comforts during their recovery, but to inform, educate and stimulate.
“The appetite to scale this further still will continue to grow in 2025. More and more trusts will refresh ageing patient entertainment systems with modern technology that can educate patients about their specific care and alleviate pressures on busy wards by allowing patients to request services without needing to ask additional questions of nursing teams.
“Hospitals have streamed content for younger patients – putting them at ease as they are moved from the ward for important imaging. They have created calmer elderly care wards. And they have even enhanced independence for severely injured and disabled patients, who have been able to operate screens through eye movement.
“It’s just a small selection of how media technology is enhancing patient experience – and I predict many more will embrace this equitably and without cost to patients in the year ahead.”
Jackie Henderson, chief client officer, and Stuart Lawrie, director, client technical services, Excelicare:
“There are several areas of technology advancement that electronic patient record vendors will be considering for inclusion in their product roadmap and development cycles. One of these areas is the wider use of “Smart on FHIR” [a healthcare standard that enables applications to access clinical information through a data store].
“This will drastically improve the sharing of patients’ healthcare data between disparate systems and NHS apps, which will enable a more comprehensive view of the patient, with the aim of improving care and reducing mistakes in case.
“The idea that Generative AI will be transformational for healthcare apps is gaining widespread attention, but there are legitimate concerns about its safe use that should be considered, too. If these can be resolved, these innovations should help to promote safe and innovative health tech solutions for wider patient populations.
“There will also be emphasis on including the patient more in their own healthcare through the use of patient technologies and asynchronous healthcare interactions, with the aim of enabling the healthcare provider to monitor patients, in order to track health and enable earlier intervention to correct problems.”
“As we move into 2025, I believe we’ll see automation and interoperability take centre stage in the NHS. Automation will be key to easing the workload on healthcare staff, allowing them to spend more time focusing on patient care rather than administrative tasks. Simple but effective changes, like streamlining meal ordering or routing service requests, can make a real difference to day-to-day operations.
“Interoperability is another area where we’ll see significant progress. The ability for systems to work seamlessly together will be vital for real-time data sharing, reducing duplication, and improving collaboration across teams. These developments won’t just enhance efficiency but will ultimately improve outcomes for patients. It’s an exciting time for healthcare technology, and I’m optimistic about how these advancements will help tackle some of the sector’s biggest challenges.”
“Accelerated maturity in generative AI, large language models, and emerging technologies that can help automate labour intensive tasks, could all help to address NHS challenges heading into 2025.
“Discussion at Digital Health Rewired 2024 surprised some delegates, who learned of a 2024 ranking of the world’s top smart hospitals. It positioned its first NHS trust at number 72. Set against a drive to advance beyond the “foothills of digital transformation”, as described by Lord Darzi, smart health, applied well could now make a meaningful difference to big policy commitments such as productivity gains, but also to daily pressures.
“There is an appetite, and an urgency, to do things differently. Generative AI, for example, has the potential to redefine how clinical teams interact with technology and transform the patient experience. Natural language processing and conversational interfaces will make electronic patient record systems more intuitive, reducing cognitive burden and the risk of burnout.
“Imagine a clinician speaking naturally to an AI assistant to generate detailed summaries, write handover notes, draft prescriptions, or retrieve critical patient history – all in seconds. As smart technologies mature, integrating them into clinical settings and clinical technology platforms, can release substantial time, but can also harness vast amounts of clinical data to support and enhance every decision for patient care.”
Kelly Woodcock, head of marketing UKI Nordics, healthcare systems and technologies, Baxter, said:
“Challenges facing the NHS have been clearly identified in 2024. How we fix those problems is a question 2025 must better resolve, and technology has a significant part to play.
“Increased adoption of new and innovative technology, and better utilisation of existing systems, has the potential to support clinical decision making, reduce administrative burdens for nurses, enhance efficiencies, and address capacity.
“But that must be accompanied by effective workflow and patient flow. Digitisation of inefficient workflows will only digitise chaos. Creating more harmonious environments means driving connectivity of devices and IT, ensuring insights flow into clinical systems, and asking more than how this can be achieved – but why.”
“Health tech companies should be able to “start-up and scale-up” in supporting the NHS with innovative technology: a pledge direct from health and social care secretary Wes Streeting at an ABHI parliamentary reception in November.
“As 2025 dawns, the latter part of his statement – scale – is particularly important; both for companies providing the tech, and for the NHS itself. Policy momentum has placed significant emphasis on wider adoption. NHS England wants to address both the discoverability and deployability of technologies.
“Lord Darzi called out the need to address sub-scale uptake of applications that improve quality and efficiency. And the newly published innovation ecosystem review led by Professor Roland Sinker calls out the need to spread “proven products”, with a failure to do so risking unwarranted variation and a perception that companies investing will struggle to grow.
“With urgency to embrace technology equitably, the NHS can little afford the time and effort required to reinvent ad infinitum. The bar must be set high in choosing what to scale. But once innovations are proven in the field with evidence in clinical practice and academic rigour, then funding and mechanisms must be in place to scale at pace and everywhere, so all patients can benefit. 2025 must be the year to make this happen.”
“Connecting all devices and data across the healthcare estate has become an even more urgent requirement, given renewed national objectives for the NHS. Investing in underlying infrastructure will be one enabler, but interoperability across every device must also come back into scrutiny in the year ahead.
“Connected devices must harness telemetry for busy healthcare professionals – from staff on general wards, to nurses in ICU, to surgeons in operating theatres. All need to be presented with data in efficient and effective ways, to help them enhance patient outcomes and respond to demands ranging from patient safety, to productivity, to waiting lists.
“And, as value-based procurement comes into focus during 2025, consideration must be given to the value of technology in supporting modern workflows, including the ability for staff to monitor and act on data remotely. When technology works, great things can start to happen.”
“In 2025, transformation will remain the cornerstone of progress for the NHS. Almost all transformation initiatives now have a digital component, but digital must serve as a supporting element to clinical and operational change, not exist as a standalone effort.
“Embedding digital tools into these broader transformations is essential to achieving meaningful impact. Financial pressures will persist and while it’s too early, post-election, to anticipate major investments in digital, the guiding principle of moving from analogue to digital will endure.
“With over 90% of NHS providers covered by electronic patient records, the focus will shift from go-lives to stabilisation and optimisation. Yet significant analogue systems remain, underscoring the importance of ‘thinking digital’ to enable true transformation.
“Cloud migration will accelerate, but cybersecurity must remain a priority. Recent cyber-attacks and IT outages show there’s still much to learn, and prevention must be prioritised through adequate investment.
“System-wide collaboration will advance as we prioritise shared EPRs and connected records. These tools not only improve interoperability but ensure data is available wherever it’s needed to keep people healthier and out of hospital. The anticipated Data (Use and Access) Bill will help make data sharing safer and more effective, a vital step for system-wide working in 2025.”
Latency, packet loss and poor bandwidth utilisation often disrupt network performance. With network infrastructure refreshes occurring on average every 5 years, the answer is usually to buy more bandwidth and to kick out the old to bring in the new by investing in the latest technology. However, this doesn’t always quite mitigate these issues, and as a result fails to deliver on its promise.
Much can be done with WAN acceleration in 2025, and it only keeps getting better in speed and capacity – which is surely the WAN you want. That’s because it deploys artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and data parallelisation to enable even SD-WANs, which have been a hot topic over the last few years, to perform much better than they would otherwise be able to do, unaccelerated without a WAN Acceleration overlay. Yes, AI is being used more often these days to improve network performance, but neither of them can so far achieve the results of WAN Acceleration.
Over the course of 2024, AI-enabled predictive network automation has nevertheless become a trend. It helps IT to access networking platform features that advance telemetry and visibility. Artificial intelligence is also increasingly a part of cloud automation and, as part of zero trust cyber-security, since cyber-attacks are using AI to become increasingly sophisticated and harder to detect.
Increasingly at the edge
Other trends that have occurred throughout the year include an increase in edge computing migration because no entity, user or device should be automatically trusted, as the basis for preventing a cyber-attack. With quantum computing being increasingly discussed, and the need for ever-more stringent and tighter data protection, SD-WAN solutions may soon incorporate quantum-resistant encryption algorithms. They can help organisations to protect their data against emerging threats. Ultimately, there is a need to advance digital business, and there has been a push for converging security and to provide digital experience assurance.
In 2025, how can WAN Acceleration fit into these trends? Well, first of all it is often also referred to as Data Acceleration because, by using AI, machine learning and data parallelisation the speed at which data is transmitted and received increases – and in a way that permits the accelerated flight of encrypted data, – which can obfuscate cyber-criminals. Still, it can fit into these trends because the likes of technologies such as PORTrockIT can significantly improve WAN and data performance and optimise bandwidth utilisation without the need to invest in higher bandwidths, or in a completely new network infrastructure.
Convergence of security and networking
The New Year, apart from some opportunistic AI-based cyber-attacks, will continue to see the convergence of security and networking into unified frameworks in the form of SASE (Secure Access Service Edge). SD-WANs will continue to increase in adoption, leaving room for organisations to add a WAN Acceleration overlay to boost their performance. The key motivation for their adoption will be to lower costs and to improve integration.
“There will also be an increasing use of multi-cloud networking software, and I expect industry cloud platforms to become increasingly popular – as will edge computing, which many industry commentators say will gain prominence in 2025 as a means for organisations to process data closer to its source,” says David Trossell, CEO and CTO of Bridgeworks, the WAN Acceleration company. He adds that with increasing data volumes, there will need to be higher computing capacity, better connectivity, and to transfer it over large distances, while using AI and machine learning to mitigate the frictional effects of latency and packet loss.
Pushing the limits
Josh Howarth, wrote in May 2024 ‘5 Top Networking Trends (2024 & 2025)’ for Exploding Topics, and said: “The performance of network infrastructure is constantly being pushed to the limit as businesses look for new ways to boost capacity and speed. Businesses want high-performing networks that are agile and scalable. But today’s IT decision-makers face a combination of uncertainty and new possibilities associated with emerging technology.”
One challenge that won’t change is the need to situated data centres and disaster recovery sites at distance from each other, outside of their own circles of disruption. Firstly, when a natural disaster strikes, organisations need to have another means of maintaining service continuity. The same applies to a situation caused by a cyber-security attack. It’s vital to ensure that not all data centres and disaster recovery sites are hit simultaneously.
WAN Acceleration can do this, while enabling organisations to achieve data transfer speeds for backups and restores of up to 200 times faster than with any other WAN enhancement technology. “Once upon a time organisations would have looked to WAN Optimisation to accelerate data transfers, but it’s a technology that often doesn’t deliver on its promise – particularly as it can’t handle large volumes of encrypted data.”
Networking market 2025
As for the networking market’s outlook for 2025, Mauricio Sanchez, who leads Dell’Oro Group’s research into the intersection of enterprise networking and security, comments in his October 2024 report, ‘The State of Enterprise Network Market in 2024: The Great Reset Before a 2025 Rebound’:
“Despite the contraction in 2024, the outlook for 2025 is brighter. The fundamental demand for digital transformation, cloud migration and hybrid work solutions remains intact. As enterprises complete the digestion of their current investments and inventories normalize, spending is expected to rebound.”
“The rise in adoption of AI-driven workloads, 5G, Wi-Fi 7, and advanced security frameworks like SASE will drive growth across the network infrastructure landscape. Furthermore, as inflation and interest rates decrease, enterprises will benefit from improved capital availability, providing further tailwinds for market growth.”
Data: Opportunity to accelerate and secure
With this growth, particularly with regard to SD-WANs, digital transformation, and everything cloud, there is an opportunity to accelerate and secure data flows with WAN Acceleration. Organisations will increasingly look to AI and machine learning for this purpose. So, in 2025, they could do well to get the WAN they want by testing different WAN networking technologies alongside each other.
The focus is often on what large companies will do in a new year. However, much innovation comes from smaller companies. Thankfully, Forbes reveals that the EY Entrepreneur Ecosystem Barometer finds that “73% of entrepreneurs [are] optimistic about AI, and 82% believe the market will be stronger in 2025.” More importantly, AI, machine learning and data parallelisation can give you the WAN that you want and make it as fast as lightning: saving time, money and brand reputations with secure data transfers. Happy New Year!
By Graham Jarvis,
Freelance Business and Technology Journalist
Lead Journalist – Business and Technology, Trudy Darwin Communications
Matrix is pleased to announce the appointment of Leslie Weare as its new Business Director. This key appointment is part of Matrix’s ambitious expansion strategy as the company continues to build on its reputation as one of the UK’s leading workforce management solutions providers. Weare will report directly to Chief Strategic Officer Suzi Smith and will be part of the strategic team responsible for driving growth across new market sectors.
Leslie Weare
Weare brings over 29 years of leadership experience in the health and social care staffing industry. Most recently, she served as Senior Business Director at Hays where she spearheaded the growth of health and social care partnerships across the South and East regions. Her career also includes senior roles at Reed Health & Care and The Prince’s Trust where she demonstrated a strong ability to develop strategies, empower high-performing teams and foster long-term partnerships.
Speaking about her new role, Weare commented, “I aim to ensure our customers get the very best from Matrix and all it can offer. My focus is on helping our clients solve staffing challenges while making the best use of their resources. Efficiency and effectiveness are key priorities, enabling our clients to make informed and sustainable decisions about staffing needs.”
In her role at Matrix, Weare will oversee client satisfaction, revenue optimisation and contract renewals. She will lead cross-functional collaboration to deliver exceptional customer experiences and ensure Matrix remains at the forefront of the workforce solutions industry. A key focus will be leveraging technology and data analytics to enhance client relationships, including maximising the capabilities of Matrix’s new platform, Prism.
Commenting on the appointment, Suzi Smith, Chief Strategic Officer at Matrix, said: “Leslie stood out for her unparalleled expertise in health and social care staffing and her proven track record of building meaningful client partnerships. Her leadership style which includes empowering teams and fostering continuous improvement aligns perfectly with Matrix’s vision. We are excited to have her on board to support our expansion and deliver even greater value to our clients.”
In her capacity as Business Director Weare will also play a pivotal role in shaping Matrix’s customer relationship management strategy, driving innovation and ensuring that the company’s client-centric values remain at the heart of its operations. Leslie’s background as a strategic business leader and experienced change manager makes her uniquely qualified to navigate the challenges of a dynamic, technology-led environment. Her focus on adding social value and her commitment to excellence in client service will undoubtedly strengthen Matrix’s position in the market.
Joint Expeditionary Force activates UK-led Nordic Warden operation following reported damage to Estlink2 undersea cable in the Baltic
System aids UK and JEF partners in maritime surveillance and detection of potential threats
Joint Expeditionary Force partners and NATO will be alerted by the system of any ships deemed a risk to key areas of interest
The Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) has activated an advanced UK-led reaction system to track potential threats to undersea infrastructure and monitor the Russian shadow fleet, following reported damage to a major undersea cable in the Baltic Sea.
The 10-nation strong Joint Expeditionary Force, of which the UK is the framework nation, has also released a statement expressing concern at the damage caused to Estlink2 and highlighting the Alliance’s commitment to working together to safeguard shared interests.
The operation, activated last week and named Nordic Warden, harnesses AI to assess data from a range of sources, including the Automatic Identification System (AIS) ships use to broadcast their position, to calculate the risk posed by each vessel entering areas of interest. The JEF action reinforces existing and planned NATO responses.
Specific vessels identified as being part of Russia’s shadow fleet have been registered into the system so they can be closely monitored when approaching key areas of interest.
If a potential risk is assessed, the system will monitor the suspicious vessel in real time and immediately send out a warning, which will be shared with JEF participant nations as well as NATO Allies.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer said:
‘’Growth and national security are vital to our Plan for Change, which is why this government is working closely with our allies to protect critical national infrastructure, such as undersea cables.
“I am pleased we are launching this cutting-edge technology so soon after the JEF Summit to enhance European security and deliver on our Plan for Change.”
Nordic Warden was activated last week under JEF protocols, which provide a series of options to the Alliance that can be activated in order to protect against potential threats. The initiative highlights how the JEF is using innovative technologies to boost collective European security, while supporting and complementing NATO’s own operations.
It comes following reported damage on Christmas Day to the Estlink2 undersea cable in the Baltic, which authorities in Finland suggest may have been caused by a tanker which forms part of Russia’s shadow fleet of vessels it uses to attempt to bypass international sanctions.
Defence Secretary John Healey MP said:
“The UK and JEF are leading the way in providing support to our Allies to help safeguard the offshore infrastructure we all rely on against potential threats.
“Nordic Warden will help protect against both deliberate acts of sabotage as well as cases of extreme negligence which we have seen cause damage to underwater cables.
“Harnessing the power of AI, this UK-led system is a major innovation which allows us the unprecedented ability to monitor large areas of the sea with a comparatively small number of resources, helping us stay secure at home and strong abroad.”
22 areas of interest – including parts of the English Channel, North Sea, Kattegat, and Baltic Sea, are currently being monitored from the JEF’s operational headquarters in Northwood, where personnel from all JEF nations work side by side.
Nordic Warden was first trialled during the summer of 2024 and again during the JEF’s Exercise Joint Protector, which saw more than 300 UK personnel deploy to Latvia to demonstrate the ability of the UK to deploy its operational headquarters for JEF abroad at short notice.
The UK has led international efforts through a global alliance to disrupt the shadow fleet. As part of the initiative launched by the Prime Minister at the European Political Community last year, the UK has sanctioned 93 oil tankers which Putin has been using to soften the blow of sanctions and bankroll his illegal war in Ukraine. Today’s announcement complements last month’s agreement between the UK, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Finland and Estonia to request proof of insurance from suspected shadow vessels as they pass along the Baltic route.
Commenting on the reported Estlink2 damage, the joint statement from Joint Expeditionary Force members said:
“This is another example of maritime incidents causing direct economic and security implications for Finland and Estonia, highlighting the risks to vital communication and energy networks essential for the security and prosperity of all our nations.
“The JEF commends Finland and Estonia for their decisive actions in dealing with the Estlink-2 power cable incident. We remain committed to supporting Participant Nations, NATO, and Allies in safeguarding our shared interests and regional stability.”
Keeping the country safe is the Government’s first priority, and an integral part of its Plan for Change. The work of the Royal Navy, British Army, and Royal Air Force, is critical to the security and stability of the UK, and Nordic Warden will help protect against threats.
The Joint Expeditionary Force is comprised of 10 like-minded nations, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Netherlands, Sweden and the UK as the Framework Nation. The JEF by design is a high readiness, adaptable force which enhance the ability of the grouping to respond rapidly to threats, anywhere in the world.
British economist and journalist Stephanie Flanders has been appointed as the new Patron of the Institute of Economic Development (IED).
Stephanie, who is Head of Economics and Government at Bloomberg – overseeing the research and journalism of 250 economists and reporters worldwide – assumes the unpaid role from outgoing IED Patron, the Baroness Blake of Leeds CBE, who was in post for two years.
Stephanie Flanders
In a distinguished career, Stephanie was previously Chief Market Strategist for Europe at J P Morgan Asset Management in London (2013-17) and BBC Economics Editor (2008-13), appearing across the wide range of BBC news output in that capacity after previously serving as Economics Editor of its Newsnight programme. She has also been Senior Advisor and speechwriter to US Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers (1997-2001), a reporter at the New York Times, the principal editor of the 2002 Human Development Report, an editorial-writer and economics columnist at the Financial Times, and an economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies and London Business School.
In 2016-17 Stephanie chaired the Inclusive Growth Commission for the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), where she engaged with city leaders and grassroots practitioners from around the country on how best to promote inclusive, place-based economic growth. She is also the Chair of the non-profit arts company Artichoke, a Trustee of the Kennedy Memorial Trust and a Governor at the Ditchley Foundation. She is an Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford and a Fellow of the Society of Professional Economists.
“There is no more important challenge – nationally and globally – than making the economy work better for people,” Stephanie explained.
“In one way or another, I have spent a good chunk of my career thinking about and reporting on this question, and I’m acutely aware that high-level debates about growth and development often lack a basic grassroots understanding of how to make these things happen in practice.
Tom Stannard
“I’d love to play a small part in bringing the two together through closer involvement in the intensely practical mission and core activities of the IED.”
IED Chair Tom Stannard commented: “We are absolutely delighted to welcome Stephanie as our new Patron. She has significant recognition as an economist, broadcaster, and as someone who has contributed to economic development commissions, including the RSA Inclusive Growth Commission, LSE Growth Commission, and Greater Manchester Independent Prosperity Review, in the recent past.
“I thank Stephanie for agreeing to take on the role of Patron, which is filled by someone who, due to his/her public achievement, exemplification of outstanding leadership and stature in society, can help the IED achieve its mission by enhancing the Institute’s credibility and the substantial contribution to UK economic development.
“I would also like to thank Baroness Blake, who is now a member of the new government’s front bench, for serving as our immediate past Patron.”
Road users on the Strategic Road Network (SRN) can feel more confident when driving through roadworks, thanks to new innovative clear, reassuring, and informative signage.
An initiative by SRL Traffic Systems, in collaboration with National Highways and Kier, has introduced an innovative use of variable message signs (VMS) to enhance the road user experience by clearly communicating changes to the road layout during roadworks.
On 23 October 2024, new signs were installed in a contraflow section of the A417 Missing Link project as part of the broader Electronic Boards for Roadworks review, which has significantly increased understanding of the changes due to roadworks.
Industry research has shown that messages which can be read within four seconds are better for our road users. The new signs display concise, friendly messages in white text over a black background. Previously signs presented yellow text on a black background.
National Highways is always seeking new ways to balance essential information with a clear and safe route through our works. For the first time, a blue-framed VMS unit is used for non-regulatory messages, strengthening its communication with road users.
The new signs allow National Highways to communicate transparently and succinctly to motorists using short simple messaging such as ‘Working even out of view’, providing an awareness of operations outside of the public eye.
National Highways can display this messaging thanks to updated standards for electronic boards for roadworks, including text colour and border additions, allowing it to use them more as electronic billboards than traditional variable message signs.
Nick Nandhra, project manager for National Highways said: “These new signs mark a significant advancement in our goal to enhance road user experiences. Clear communication during roadworks is crucial, and we’re excited to set a new standard in road messaging and launch these signs for the first time.”
The Electronic Boards for Roadworks guidelines drive design and compliance improvements by ensuring:
Enhanced visibility
Alignment with national guidelines
Safe positioning within the work zone
Placement away from critical decision points
No interference with directional signage
Minimal distractions for drivers
Kier and SRL Traffic Systems collaborate to maintain signage and provide real-time updates.
Caroline Weller, VMS manager at SRL Traffic Systems said: “As the first scheme implementing this standard, we’re thrilled to showcase a modern, customer-focused approach to traffic management.”
National Highways will continue refining messages based on road user insights, addressing road user concerns, and keeping messages relevant throughout each project phase.
Kier project director Gavin Jones highlighted the initiative’s success, stating: “The A417 Missing Link team are very pleased to have worked with National Highways and SRL on this initiative, and to be the first project to deploy the new signs. We are confident that the signs will assist motorists travelling through the A417 and improve their journeys.”
Landmark deal struck to bring military housing estate back into public hands
Major deal unlocks new-build housing projects for military families plus essential refurbishments
End to huge annual rental bill to save around £230 million per year
A major deal to bring the Armed Forces housing estate back into public ownership has been agreed by the government. Billions of pounds will be saved by the deal over the next decade, delivering savings for taxpayers and enabling additional investment into homes for military families. The landmark move reverses a sale undertaken by the Government in 1996.
The Defence Secretary describes today’s announcement as a “decisive break” with the failed approach of the past, which will enable the first steps to be taken to fix the long-term decline in housing for military families and deliver homes fit for heroes. He will also commit to using the deal to help achieve the Government’s milestones on kickstarting economic growth and boosting housebuilding across the country.
Today’s deal will bring to an end to an arrangement which has seen the taxpayer spend billions of pounds on rental payments for military housing while still being liable for rising maintenance costs and handing back billions of pounds worth of military properties.
Under the agreement, the Ministry of Defence (MOD) will buy back 36,347 houses, making major redevelopment and improvements possible. The deal is part of the Government’s drive to boost military morale, tackle recruitment and retention challenges and renew the nation’s contract with those who serve.
The MOD, supported by UK Government Investments, and Annington have formally agreed that the MOD will reacquire the service family estate sold in 1996, which is now valued at £10.1 billion when not subject to leases, and is being purchased for £5,994,500,000, representing excellent value for money.
The new deal will see the immediate saving of more than £600,000 of taxpayers’ money each day, with the current annual bill of £230 million in rent being eliminated. These savings to the defence budget will help to fix “deep-set problems” in military housing, and support the development of a high-quality new homes for military families.
The announcement comes as the Government kickstarts work on a new military housing strategy, to be published next year. Key principles of the strategy will include: a generational renewal of Armed Forces accommodation; new opportunities for forces homeownership; and better use of MOD land to support the delivery of affordable homes for families across Britain.
The first steps in the strategy will include the rapid development of an action plan to deliver on the “once in a generation” opportunities unlocked by today’s deal. This work will involve independent experts, forces families and cross-government input.
This will support the Government’s Plan for Change, which is built on the strong foundation of national security. It also comes alongside the Prime Minister’s Homes for Heroes pledge to exempt veterans from rules requiring a connection to a local area before accessing social housing.
Defence Secretary, John Healey MP, said:
“This deal shows our government is determined to deliver homes fit for our heroes. This is a once in a generation opportunity, not only to fix the dire state of military housing but to help drive forward our economic growth mission, creating jobs and boosting British housebuilding.
“Our armed forces and their families make extraordinary sacrifices: theirs is the ultimate public service. It is shameful that in the lead up to Christmas, too many military families will be living with damp, mould and sub-standard homes – issues which have built up over the past decade.
“We are determined to turn this around and renew the nation’s contract with those who serve. These important savings to the defence budget will help fix the deep-set problems we inherited. I thank the teams who have helped us reach this landmark deal at pace – another example of this government delivering for defence.
“There is still a lot of work to do to deliver the homes our military families deserve, and these problems will not be fixed overnight. But this is a decisive break with the failed approach of the past and a major step forward on that journey.”
Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Darren Jones said:
“This is a landmark deal that will start saving the taxpayer money immediately, all while driving forward our mission to create growth across the country.
“Not only does it open the door to major development and improvements across the military housing estate, but most important of all, it will help us on our mission to build more houses and deliver our service personnel the homes they deserve.”
The original agreement did not strike an appropriate balance of risk and reward, and it is estimated the taxpayer is nearly £8 billion worse off as a result. Money which should have been better spent on maintaining and improving our service family homes.
Eliminating the liabilities associated with the leases creates budgetary headroom to partially fund this purchase, meaning that the public expenditure impact of this measure, and the impact on net financial debt, is confined to £1.7 billion.
The 1996 sale saw 55,000 houses sold for an average of just £27,000 each property. In buying these houses back, the government will control properties worth almost ten times that average value and will no longer be paying £230 million annually in rent.
Other areas of the deal that have cost taxpayers money or prevented improvements to the estate include:
Annually handing back hundreds of empty properties to Annington, totalling more than 18,000 properties since 1996 – worth an estimated £5.2 billion by today’s valuations.
Although the deal included a discount from market rent rates, the MOD – and therefore the taxpayer – have been responsible for all maintenance on all properties.
If the MOD spent money improving a property for service families, in some circumstances this could incur greater rental costs under the terms of the deal.
Despite most of the properties having been built in the 1950s and 1960s, the deal has prevented the MOD from being able to demolish properties or build additional houses for Service Families.
Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin said:
“Housing provision is a constant part of life for Service Personnel and their families, who support them closely throughout their military careers. We understand the importance placed on this for people’s morale and decisions on whether to continue in the Armed Forces long-term.
“This deal is a crucial step in being able to deliver meaningful change for those who serve – an opportunity to regain control of the estate and move forward with substantial redevelopment and refurbishment. This work will provide military families the higher-quality houses they fully deserve. It is very significant and very welcome.”
Following today’s deal, the MOD can start work on substantive redevelopment and improvements. The agreement frees up our ability to build on the Service Family Accommodation estate with a more modern estate, helping reduce maintenance costs and, as part of work facilitated by the deal, programmes to build new houses are being accelerated.
Planning applications will be submitted in the coming days for 265 new houses and apartments at RAF Brize Norton, and further plans will be submitted in the Spring for around 300 new houses at Catterick Garrison.
The potential for improvements to the estate can already be seen where family housing is being provided outside of the 1996 deal. At Imjin Barracks in Gloucestershire 176 modern homes are being built, which include low-carbon heating systems and solar panels, reducing energy costs for military families and improving sustainability.
The landmark deal to repurchase the estate from Annington follows the MOD’s comprehensive success in the High Court last year. The agreement brings the properties back to public ownership and delivering long term value for money for current and future taxpayers.
Since July, the Government has slashed recruitment red tape to make the process more straightforward for those wanting to join the military, announced the largest Armed Forces pay increase for 22 years and recently the Armed Forces Commissioner Bill passed its Second Reading in the House of Commons.
Velorim is calling on cycling community to nominate their local bike shop to join the scheme
Ambition will see more than 1,000 places for people to recycle bicycle tyres and inner tubes across the UK
Velorim, the UK’s simple solution to recycling bicycle tyres and inner tubes, has announced its ambition to double collection points across the UK by 2026, as it continues its mission to make cycling greener.
With over 600 locations across the country already, the recycling service aims to make recycling bike tyres and inner tubes even easier for cyclists, providing a cost-effective solution to reducing the impact of cycling waste on the environment.
Every year 44,000 tonnes of bicycle tyres and inner tubes are discarded by cyclists*. Limited recycling resources means that much of this waste is either sent to landfill where materials leak lead and zinc into the soil, or incineration where 3 tonnes of CO2 are produced per one tonne of rubber incinerated.
Velorim aims to tackle the issue by making the recycling of these materials as easy as possible for the cycling community. Through offering a recycling collection scheme at local bike shops, the service is set up to make recycling as convenient and cheap as possible.
Since starting collections in 2020, Velorim has collected more than 150,000 tyres and 150,000 inner tubes for recycling. To help them achieve their goal of doubling collection points by 2026, co-founders of Velorim Russ Taylor and Richard Lawrence are calling on cyclists to nominate their local bike shop, repairers and mechanics to join the scheme:
“We know that cyclists tend to take an active approach to ecological and environmental matters and our service is there to support this ethos. We have made a steady growth since starting our business in 2020, but we know there are still many areas across the country that we’re yet to reach. We’re calling on bike retailers and the cycling community to embrace the service and support us in our mission to make cycling even greener. Cyclists can nominate local bike businesses to sign up to the scheme.”
Velorim currently has more than 600 collection points across the UK. To find your nearest collection point visit Velorim-Group.com.
To become a Velorim Centre or to nominate your local bike shop, visit Velorim-Group.com.
Moe Forouzan, Team Manager – Business and Innovation at Blaenau Gwent County Borough Council, has been elected to the Board of the Institute of Economic Development (IED), the UK’s leading professional body for economic development and regeneration practitioners.
With 19 years’ experience in local government, Moe heads up Blaenau Gwent’s Economic Development Unit, specialising in driving business growth, addressing retention challenges, and managing industrial and office premises, including employment land. His strategic oversight encompasses the development and management of the Council’s business and economic functions, focusing on implementing economic stimulus initiatives, and fostering collaborative networks that both enhance local supply chains and peer-to-peer support.
Moe Forouzan
Moe is particularly passionate about supporting startups, SMEs and business relocation projects, helping them thrive in dynamic and competitive environments. A Trained Master Enterprise Facilitator, he is the only UK certified practitioner of the Sirolli model of Enterprise Facilitation, personally trained by Dr Ernesto Sirolli. This innovative approach provides free and confidential business support to entrepreneurs and social enterprises, empowering local communities through entrepreneurship. Moe’s public sector expertise is underpinned by both an undergraduate and Master’s degree in Business and Enterprise Development obtained from the University of South Wales, and experience in managing family-run businesses.
With his appointment to the IED Board announced at the Institute’s Annual General Meeting on 4th December, Moe revealed that his commitment to economic development is “both professional and personal, driving me to continuously refine my knowledge and deliver impactful outcomes” across the public, private and third sectors. He said this experience made him “highly adaptable and well-suited to leadership roles in diverse business contexts”.
“I am really excited by this opportunity to join the IED Board, and to work with people who are passionate about economic development,” Moe explained. “I am delighted to be part of an organisation that has a clear shared ambition, and is considered a heavyweight in its field. The IED is recognised as a distinctive and highly credible player in economic development, offering unparalleled CPD opportunities and action for the profession, and as a member I already see the value from its activities. The professional development I have experienced has been amazing, always challenging, and focused on helping practitioners to improve. Being on the Board is an opportunity for me to give back too, including through mentoring support. It really is the best place for me to be as a practitioner.
“As an organisation there is an opportunity to develop our links in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but growing membership in Wales is really big for me. I want to help promote the benefits of the IED, and to encourage more and more practitioners to be part of the national economic development movement, which in turn will support the delivery of best practice in local and regional communities in Wales. I have seen austerity in economic development, and how to re-boot it, and now is the time to kick on again.
“We have a UK/Welsh government talking about growth. Growth is one of the biggest ticket items going on and we have got to back economic development because it links to everything. If we invest in economic development, and channel our ambition, we will grow economy.”
Ellie Fry, Corporate Director of Regeneration and Community Services at Blaenau Gwent Council, commented: “This is a really exciting appointment for Moe personally and for the Council professionally. Moe is passionate about economic development and supporting businesses of all sizes to thrive and grow in Blaenau Gwent and I know that he will bring this enthusiasm and commitment to his new role on the Board of the IED. Well done Moe.”
Tom Stannard, Chair of the IED said: “I would like to formally welcome Moe to the IED Board of Directors, and look forward to working with him as we seek to further deliver our mission and push the objectives of our Grow Local, Grow National manifesto across the UK.”
AMION Consulting Director and former Whitehall economist joins the IED Board
Simon Dancer, Director at AMION Consulting, has been appointed to the Board of the Institute of Economic Development (IED), the UK’s leading professional body for economic development and regeneration practitioners.
With over 25 years’ experience in economic development, housing and regeneration, Simon joined the leading UK-wide economics advisory business AMION in 2016 to provide independent strategic advice to its clients to help them achieve economic growth.
Simon Dancer
Simon previously worked in Whitehall for 16 years at the Homes & Communities Agency (now Homes England), managing a team of specialised economists. In addition to an extensive understanding of Green Book economic appraisal and business cases, Simon has co-authored several economics policy guidance notes that have become “industry standards”.
These include the ground-breaking Employment Densities Guide, applied across the UK, to calculate job capacity within built development; the pioneering Additionality Guide, used around the world to help public sector agencies identify the real effect of government intervention and saw Simon present to a global academic audience at the World Bank in Paris; and the Endowments Best Practice Note, now in its fourth edition, which underpins endowment policy across the country for those assets which cannot be disposed of in the open market.
Some of Simon’s other career highlights include providing housing policy advice for the South Korean government, advising a former Prime Minister’s household, acting as a consultee for updates of HM Treasury’s Green Book, and being the retained economic adviser for the West Midlands Combined Authority for over four years.
Simon was also instrumental with AMION helping to secure £459 million of Levelling Up Fund grant across the country, from the three rounds of competitive bidding. Today he is also a business case adviser for Ebbsfleet Development Corporation, working on Green Book-compliant submissions to both MHCLG and HMT.
With his election to the IED Board announced at the Institute’s Annual General Meeting on 4th December, Simon said: “I am delighted to join the IED, as the go-to centre for excellence in the sector, and one whose insights are a reference point for the economic development profession. With over 25 years’ experience under my belt, 16 in the public sector and now well established in the private sector, putting myself forward for the IED Board feels like a natural position. I see the IED as the kitemark for our profession.”
Simon uses the IED’s well-established online CPD programme for new starters in AMION’s economic development team, and also praised its representation and advocacy work. “The training it provides is a big bonus, bringing a formalised process around on-the-money courses which balance the technical and softer side of economic development,” he commented. “If you work in economic development, the IED is that North Star for the industry. There is a huge opportunity for us to make a difference, to increase our membership, and influence the new government, especially on areas they are not funding yet.”
Tom Stannard, Chair of the IED, said: “I would like to formally welcome Simon to the IED Board of Directors, and look forward to working with him as we seek to further deliver our mission and push the objectives of our Grow Local, Grow National manifesto across the UK.”
Lymington-based British firm Bridgeworks, which is headquartered in the UK and which specialises in WAN Acceleration is now a listed supplier for the United Nations. The company, which has unique, fully patented technology, can thwart as well as obfuscate cyber-criminals.
Bridgeworks was also invited to join a 2-day UK Trade Mission to the UN by the Department for Business and Trade (DBT). The DBT hosted a select number of healthcare, facilities and infrastructure and cybersecurity entrepreneurs and companies on 20th and 21st June 2024 to discuss United Nations procurement and future opportunities of interest.
Why WAN Acceleration?
WAN Acceleration is a technology that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to mitigate the retarding effects of latency and packet loss upon data egress and ingress on Wide Area Networks. Latency and packet loss slow down data transfers. They create a window for slow data backups and restores, while also providing time for cyber-criminals to divert sensitive data.
At worst, their impact could lead to a significant amount of downtime and, in the case of a data breach, there could be significant reputational and financial losses. This could be from, for example, non-compliance to GDPR or from non-compliance to other international and national data protection laws and regulations – including in the US.
British talent welcomed
Pete Newman, Senior Trade & Investment Officer, says he really appreciates the participation of UK cyber companies – including Bridgeworks. “It was a real pleasure to host 15 companies and to meet with entrepreneurs representing the best of British industry and innovation,” he says.
In a LinkedIn post after the event, he continues: “UN agencies in New York and across the globe procure nearly $30B per year across a wide variety of goods and services. The UK is the third largest country supplier to the UN with $1.3 billion supplied according to the latest figures.”
Unfortunately, since the meeting, new figures have arisen. In an email, he reveals that the UK has dropped to become the 7th largest country supplier to the UN. This is caused by procurement numbers dropping across the UN from the highs of 2021 and 2022. “They were a result of spending, due to the pandemic. The latest numbers available from 2023 are still at historic highs for the UN, but down from $29B to $24B,” he states.
UN HQ tour
Returning back to his LinkedIn post, he comments: “In addition to attending the Trade Mission at British Consulate General in New York, delegates toured the UN headquarters to gain a better understanding of the organisation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in support of international development, fighting poverty, promoting human rights and the UN’s commitment to maintaining international peace and security.”
Bridgeworks’ invitation came after being asked to attend by the UK Trade Team at the British Embassy in Washington, where the firm attended a previous conference.
David Trossell
Generating interest
Antony Reynolds, Vice-President, Federal and National Security Business and Global Channels Leader at Bridgeworks, attended the Trade Mission with the company’s CEO and CTO, David Trossell. They attended roundtable discussions and presentations with UN procurement officials, and Trossell then gave a 20-minute presentation to UN procurement managers on day two.
“By far, we generated the most interest and triggered many questions from the UN Buyers, with a lot of interest in data centre transfer speed and efficiency,” says Reynolds. He points out that the main reason for attending the Mission was to increase Bridgeworks’ visibility because before the meeting, UN procurement knew nothing about Bridgeworks.
It also allows the firm to respond to Request for Information (RFIs) and tender invitations. “We are now seeing regular RFI and Bid invitations from the UN Trade Alert Service, with the caveat that the parameters for products and services needs to be reviewed and tweaked.” It works through the UN Global Procurement Portal, the UN Global Marketplace.
He adds: “We have shown that we exist, and that we have been supported by the British Government. Subsequently, we are now registered as a supplier to the UN.” Ultimately, it’s all about selling WAN Acceleration to the UN, as there is a huge sales opportunity across the organisation. For Bridgeworks, at the moment, that relates to deals of up to £100,000 each. The firm’s investment might increase if their registration proves successful.
Mission successful
David Trossell, CEO and CTO of Bridgeworks, remarks that Bridgeworks involvement in the Trade Mission was a success: “While there is no immediate business, we have shown why Bridgeworks exists, that it exists and why WAN Acceleration is a crucial technology for obfuscating cyber-criminals, as well as for moving large volumes of data around the world.”
He therefore looks forward to being involved in more Trade Missions in the near future, and he counsels innovative British businesses to join the UN Global Market Place to increase their influence and reach. The impact of being a UN listed supplier can be positive – by helping to raise the profile of company such as Bridgeworks beyond the United Nations.
These relate to appeals that challenge local authority decisions about the level of support to be provided to children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) via an education, health and care plan (EHCP).
During this period, there was a 55% increase in registered SEND appeals compared to the same period in the previous academic year.
The Tribunal notes the following reasons as contributing to the increase:
The continued effect of the 2014 SEND reforms, which introduced EHCPs and extended the provision of support from birth to 25 years of age
The expansion of the Tribunal’s powers to make non-binding recommendations on health and social care (where there is a valid appeal on an educational element of the plan)
The growth in the number of families seeking EHCP assessments and, subsequently, the rise in the number of children and young people with an EHCP.
Laura Thompson
Laura Thompson, Senior Associate specialising in SEND matters within the education team at UK and Ireland law firm Browne Jacobson, said: “These latest set of statistics make for alarming reading. While the factors suggested by the SEND Tribunal will have played a role, each of these have existed for some time – yet this is a problem that is increasing exponentially, with the 55% rise in appeals this year a significant uptick on figures of 24% and 29% in the previous two years.
“This is not a sustainable trend and only serves to further undermine the support available to SEND children. In most cases, Tribunal hearings are being listed at least a year after an appeal is registered, which, when considered in the context of a child’s education, is huge.
“Throw in the recent Department for Education data showing that permanent exclusions were up by more than a third in the 2023/24 autumn term – with SEND pupils accounting for roughly half of these, and it’s clear to see why four in five of respondents to our School Leaders Survey said they are dissatisfied with government SEND policy.
“Unfortunately, there isn’t an obvious solution to the appeals issue. The Tribunal has recently consulted on a proposal for all ‘refusal to assess’ appeals to be automatically heard on the papers, with a view to cutting down waiting times, but this will do little to steady the flow of appeals when these types of appeals represented only 27% of the total number registered.
“So what else can be done? It is unlikely there is one ‘right’ answer. The previous government proposed mandatory mediation as part of its SEND review in 2022. This was met with mixed opinions, with some feeling this would only serve to further protract the resolution process.
“However, high-quality mediation can be an incredibly useful tool for reaching agreement and the current requirement to only ‘consider’ mediation in most cases means that, a lot of the time, it isn’t accessed at all. Mandatory mediation may not be the answer, but something has to be done and perhaps it is worth a revisit.”
Momentum Transport Consultancy and Spatial Design Hub have announced the launch of Micromobility PlannerTM – a cutting-edge geospatial analysis software tool and app designed to enable local authorities to optimise shared micromobility networks.
Developed for use by counties, local authorities and combined authorities, the subscription-based online tool is set to empower decision makers in UK and Ireland towns and cities to strategically plan micromobility, including eScooters and eBikes, as part of efficient, equitable and sustainable local transport plans.
Micromobility Planner has been developed with funding from The Department for Transport (DfT) in partnership with Connected Places Catapult through Transport Research and Innovation Grants’ (TRIG) local transport decarbonisation strand.
A new era in micromobility planning
Steve Hands, Transport Planner and Shared Micromobility Lead at Camden Council said: “Micromobility Planner would be particularly helpful to boroughs starting their micromobility journey. It provides valuable data to help with scheme planning and inform conversations with micromobility operators. In our experience, it’s essential to put parking zones in the right places to ensure all areas have access to these transport options and the zones meet local demand.”
Micromobility Planner addresses key challenges in the fast-evolving landscape of shared micromobility planning by providing:
Comprehensive demand insights: The tool leverages census data and geospatial analytics to pinpoint areas of high demand, helping cities strategically deploy resources and micromobility services, maximise ridership potential, reduce carbon emissions and address transport deserts. The software can be used to determine the most suitable areas to start a new shared micromobility scheme, or to extend an existing one, and to define the shared micromobility scheme planners want to see by inputting desired operating areas and fleet size.
Parking optimisation: By calculating parking density and accessibility requirements, the tool assists in designing infrastructure that reduces conflicts with pedestrians and minimises disruptions to car parking revenue. With Micromobility Planner, towns and cities can quickly decide how much micromobility parking space to provide and where to locate it, to avoid challenges such as pavement clutter.
Customisable scenarios: Local authorities can easily model different scenarios to optimise docked and dockless bike schemes, eScooters and other shared micromobility systems.
Sustainability alignment: The software integrates metrics to support cities’ sustainability and carbon-neutral goals.
Will Durden, managing director at Momentum said: “Local authorities are under pressure to reduce carbon emissions, promote sustainable transport and manage traffic congestion – and well-designed shared micromobility schemes, such as eBikes and eScooters, have great potential to redefine how people move around our towns and cities. But their integration comes with challenges.
“We have already seen several micromobility trials ending and being removed across the UK, and in large part we believe this is down to a lack of data, information and strategic exchange on questions such as fleet size, where micromobility hubs and parking locations should be placed and how many are needed to optimise their effectiveness.
“Local authorities currently have no choice but to rely on information from operators or to commission bespoke studies, both of which can be expensive. For a monthly subscription Micromobility Planner puts independent evidence at the fingertips of all local authorities in the UK and Ireland for the very first time, allowing them to take strategic, data-driven decisions on how micromobility can plug into their local transport networks most effectively.”
James O’Brien, founder of Spatial Design Hub added: “Our aim with Micromobility Planner is to combine Momentum’s bespoke consultancy with Spatial Design Hub’s expertise in geospatial analysis, and bespoke cloud-based technology solutions. As a result, Micromobility Planner harnesses powerful GIS data and analytics to give decision makers highly-granular, independent information which they can use to review and align operators’ proposals with their local priorities.
“This is a first for the UK and Ireland, and we believe it can revolutionise shared mobility by putting transport planners at towns and cities in the driving seat. We’re confident that more places will be able to plan seamless, user-friendly and environmentally-conscious shared micromobility networks by using Micromobility Planner, and taking more informed, strategic decisions.”
By Elli Kiely, Design & Innovation Director, HJK Construction
Open any newspaper in the UK, and it will mention the housing crisis in the UK. The actual extent of the crisis is hotly debated, but there is one thing everyone agrees on – there is undoubtedly a serious problem with the supply and demand of housing in this country. In 2018, The National Housing Federation suggested there should be 340,000 new homes built every year until 2031, with 145,000 of these in the social and affordable category. In 2022, the NHBC reported that 191,801 homes were built in the UK. Far short of what is generally believed to be necessary. The UK is one of Europe’s most expensive places to buy or rent a home. It has among the fewest homes per person. Over 50% of people in the UK live in households that spend more than 40% of their income on housing costs.
Elli Kiely
Given these costs, one way to alleviate the crisis is to increase the amount of affordable housing. Affordable housing for sale is defined as homes are sold at a discounted rate of at least 20% below market value, either by shared ownership, a discounted sales rate by developers, or discounted by the First Homes Scheme, which sells homes to people at 30-50% below market value. The National Planning Policy Framework requires that 10% of new homes built in major residential developments are affordable.
Over the last five years, around half of all new affordable homes were delivered through developer contributions, with most of the rest delivered through the Government’s Affordable Homes Programme.
Housing Associations are another way that the housing crisis might be alleviated. These associations are not-for-profit social landlords providing homes and support for around six million people around England. Housing associations build a quarter of England’s new homes, including almost all new social and affordable homes. Here at HJK Construction, after completing our first development with a housing association, we found that the standards were met and expectations were excellent. Housing Associations are committed to quality, and we are excited about the potential for further successful collaboration.
However, there is a very high demand for Housing Association properties. In the North West, as of July 2024, almost 200,000 households were on housing associations’ waiting lists. Liverpool has the highest figure with 10,683 waiting for a home within its local authority, closely followed by Manchester with 8,394. The average waiting time for a three-bedroom family home in Manchester is around four years. The North must create 16,603 new social houses to meet needs.
However, collaborations between Housing Associations and SMEs face a huge hurdle, and it’s one at the very centre of the housing crisis – planning permission and how it’s currently working in the UK.
Delays with applications are holding back construction projects and the delivery of new homes. These planning bottlenecks are seriously failing communities—many people are simply being left without suitable housing, forcing them to move elsewhere. Post-COVID, many local authorities’ lead times for planning decisions have increased dramatically. The Housebuilding Federation’s 2023 report stated that planning permission for new housing has continued to decline and is predicted to fall to unprecedented levels.
Local Authorities need to streamline the planning process—making it leaner, more efficient, and crucially, much quicker. Put simply, faster decisions mean more houses can be built, alleviating the housing shortage. We urge local authorities up and down the country to recognise the detrimental effects these delays are having and take steps to hold planning departments accountable for timely and efficient decision-making.
Speeding up planning approval addresses the housing crisis and has substantial knock-on effects nationally and locally. Building new homes helps create jobs, encourages the establishment of businesses, and stimulates the local economy. Ailing towns, suburbs, and villages have been revitalised across the country by building new homes.
A survey published in 2023, commissioned by the Homebuilder’s Federations, Close Brothers Property Finance, and Travis Perkins, shows that 93% of SMEs cite securing planning as a major barrier to growth. 91% of these businesses say that planning departments in local authorities need to be more resourced, hindering SME homebuilders’ growth. 46% of SME developers say the cost of obtaining planning permission has risen by over 30% in the past three years.
We urge local authorities to recognise the impact of planning delays on the housing sector and take steps to hold planning departments accountable for timely and efficient decision-making. We recognise that council budgets are tight, and the staffing and management of planning departments are under considerable strain, but we ask local authorities to recognise how beneficial housebuilding is to the local economy and act accordingly. There is huge potential for growth, job creation, and town and urban centre regeneration; all it needs to be is enabled by a positive, proactive approach from central government and local authorities.
James Johns, Head of Corporate Affairs, UK, Workday
Nations across the globe are feeling a squeeze on skills. One recent McKinsey study found that nine in ten executives or managers are having trouble hiring people with the talent they need – or that they expect to have that problem in the next five years.
Paradoxically, these shortages are becoming more acute despite the rapid rise in degree-qualified candidates in most developed nations. In the UK, student numbers have approximately doubled since the 1990s – and similar trends are seen across the OECD38 countries.[1] Meanwhile, a study from Dell predicts that 85% of the jobs which will exist in 2030 are yet to be invented.
With such shifts already taking place – and more on the horizon – it’s clear that ‘jobs for life’ are a thing of the past. What’s more, learning should no longer be limited to school and university. Instead, it must continue throughout our careers in a way that’s integrated into our work and which provides us with the evolving skills we need for a flourishing career and a strong economy.
Yet today we’re not nurturing a skills-based workforce in this way. From limiting business growth to driving inflation and stunting individual careers, the ramifications of the skills shortage are far reaching. Stakeholders across business, academia and government need new strategies for bridging the gap.
It’s positive to see the new Labour government prioritising the skills gap, with the introduction of the Skills England bill set to unite businesses, skills providers, unions, Mayoral Combined Authorities and national government to deliver a highly trained workforce. Initiatives such as this, alongside the strategic use of new technologies like AI, will be crucial in creating the skilled workforce the future needs.
Assessing the new government’s skills strategy
Announced in the King’s Speech, the Skills England Bill aims to “provide learners with the skills required to thrive in life, businesses with the trained workforce they need to succeed and local areas with access to the right skills to spur economic growth.” This will entail delivering skills ranging from the essential to the highly technical.
At the heart of the bill is an ambition to map the current skills landscape across England, identify critical gaps and work with stakeholders across the public and private sectors to address them. With research showing that the number of skills shortage vacancies doubled between 2017 and 2022 to a total of 531,200 this will be no mean feat. It will require the tracking, analysis and management of vast amounts of data. Such a process will also need to be ongoing – reacting to new demands and shifts in the workforce in real time to continuously address new skill requirements as the needs of the economy evolve.
Supporting the UK’s shift to a skills-based workforce cannot though solely be left to the Government, vital though their leadership will be. Employers also have a critical role to play. In both cases, AI and other innovative technologies can help. These tools are uniquely suited to the analysis of the significant pools of data that’s necessary for tackling a challenge as complex as nationwide skills shortages. What’s more, they can do so efficiently, without the need for costly investment in more manual work.
Applying AI to skills shortages
For more than a decade, Workday has been at the forefront of applying AI to human capital management (HCM). Our AI innovations have been built on an unprecedentedly clean and structured dataset informed by billions of transactions and tens of millions of users.
At the heart of our approach to AI in HCM is Workday Skills Cloud, which can analyse and map existing skills and identify key gaps. It does so by drawing on data sources that contain more than 200 million identified skills while using large language models to maintain a definitive taxonomy of skills in 16 different languages. From there, it provides a range of features – from recommended learning to bolster skills, toanalyticswhich allow employers to identify and tackle unknown skill gaps before they become critical. Already used by a quarter of Fortune 500 companies, it provides a clear example of how large organisations with complex and diverse workforces can effectively use technology to tackle skill gaps at scale. When employers understand skills, they can deploy the right people to the right projects, and tap into or build new talent pools, improving both agility and diversity. When employees understand skills, they can make more informed decisions about their work, better plan their career progression and access higher-paying, more fulfilling roles. As consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton has stated, “Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help democratize access to opportunities […] Al can yield a greater, more diverse talent pool than old-fashioned networks.”
One business that’s harnessed the benefits of Skills Cloud is the aerospace and power leader Rolls-Royce, which first deployed the tool in 2020. The business was responding to reports from employees that they felt careers were siloed and that skills weren’t being transferred or nurtured effectively between departments.
During its rollout, Skills Cloud quickly took off. During the pilot alone, 60% of people completed a profile and a third of managers raised a ‘gig’ – a skills-based request for internal candidates for specific jobs or tasks. The first rollout ended with 4,000 people, and since then the business has continued to scale quickly, with 10,000 people onboard at the last count.
Thousands of Rolls Royce’s employees have been using the platform to develop skills and discover new opportunities. It’s not only helping the business to efficiently target skills where needed, but also enabling it to paint a clear picture of the overall skills (and shortages) across the organisation. As a result, leaders are able to make informed strategic decisions on workforce planning, while individual employees can cultivate and apply skills in a way that bolsters career development and satisfaction.
Moving to a skills-based future
The significant scale of Rolls-Royce’s deployment reveals how technology can aid the shift to a skills-based future.
New technology can rapidly map skills across different departments or even organisations, offering a bird’s eye view of gaps. It can empower individuals and teams to untap and nurture existing skills and direct human capital within an organisation to where it will have the greatest impact.
It’s through deployment of intelligent technology like this, combined with political will, that we’ll build a workforce that continuously nurtures skills and can meet the challenges of both today and tomorrow.
[1] Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Education at a Glance 2022: OECD Indicators (Paris: OECD, 2022).
New research challenges the idea that 2024 was the year of the ‘digital election’ – particularly for younger voters
New nationally representative research from Marketreach, the marketing authority on commercial mail, reveals that mail is more likely to have had an influence on voting intention than any other marketing channel across all ages. 27% said that Mail was ‘most influential’ on making decisions compared with 24% saying TV and 18% who chose social media.
Mail was voted as having the highest level of engagement at 70%, i.e. it is most likely to be read, shared or talked about, and it was seen as most trustworthy in the run up to the 2024 general election. In fact, it was regarded as almost twice as trustworthy by voters than other channels on average*. Mail is also much less associated with misleading or inaccurate information (20%), compared with social media (34%).
The youngest age groups polled demonstrated the highest levels of engagement with mail. For instance, among 18-24-year-olds, over four in five (81%) people said they had engaged with mail during the run up to the election, higher than social media (72%), posters (67%), online advertising (64%) and party political broadcasts on TV (51%).
Among 25-34-year-olds the figures were 69% for mail, followed by social media (63%), posters (52%), online advertising (48%) and party political broadcasts on TV (32%). In addition, 60% of 18-19 year olds (new voters) kept any mail until a few days before the election versus an average of 27%.
Andrew Marr, journalist, broadcaster and commentator, wrote in the report’s foreword: “Elections are national, sometimes even global, events. But in our Parliamentary system, they are first of all local ones. We want a direct, emotional connection between ourselves, the candidates and ultimately the MP. It’s about intimate space – mail arrives at an actual address not an IP address; a physical postcode, not a digital identifier; something I can hold in my hand, not something only held, briefly, in the mind’s eye. And something that I can trust. This report is a welcome dose of reality, a happy corrective.”
The research was conducted in partnership with Thinks Insight & Strategy. Released during this year’s Parliament Week (18th-24th November), the research and report explore voter behaviour in relation to marketing from all parties in the 2024 election. The report from Marketreach, entitled Landslide: How mail swept the board for political parties in the 2024 General Election, explores why certain channels are more effective over others. The research found that mail is more effective at:
Making people think
Voters who received election mail found that it was more than 50% more effective at making them think about their voting intentions than other channels. This could be because mail was seen as having close to twice the relevance of other marketing channels in the run up to the election and was the most likely of all channels tested to be perceived as trustworthy. Subsequently, mail was considered the most useful channel for future election communications – chosen by 36% of respondents, compared with 31% who said party political broadcasts and 15% who said social media.
Being memorable
There was some Election mail presence throughout the campaign, but the volume became much larger towards the end of the campaign period. It became the most recalled communications channel – with three quarters (74%) recalling a piece of mail towards the end of the campaign compared to one third (32%) for social media from political parties.
Reaching voters locally
Locality is important. Mail is the only medium that can be localised down to constituency level, which means the content can be personalised to very small groups of voters and their concerns, with 65% of respondents reporting that mail was primarily focused on the election in their local constituency. This is almost three times higher than the figure for online advertising (22%) and for social media (23%).
Amanda Griffiths, Head of Planning & Insight at Marketreach who commissioned the research said: “Everyone thought reaching voters in this election was going to be about digital channels. It wasn’t. In fact, mail proved to be the most effective way for political parties to communicate – according to the voters themselves. And it’s even more effective when integrated with other media. For all the talk about the shift to digital in all areas of life, there are some times when we want things to be tangible, steadfast and dependable. When it comes to important moments of contemplation we want to deliberate carefully and in our own time. Mail delivers on this desire, and it is effective with younger generations too.”
The NHS emerged as an election issue during the campaign, which posed a challenge for Labour. The party knew it was going to inherit an economy with low levels of growth and high levels of debt. It also knew the NHS was struggling and ‘unprotected’ public services were facing cutbacks on an undeliverable scale.
The Highland Marketing advisory board met to discuss Labour’s first 100 days in office, the Darzi review, the Budget, and prospects for technology in next year’s 10 Year Health Plan.
Their view? The new government has got off to a slow start and needs to come through with a realistic plan for the future of health and care with technology as a key enabler.
If Rishi Sunak had gone to the polls when political correspondents predicted that he would, the UK would have been voting at the start of November. However, he called an election in May, the country voted on 4 July, and Sir Keir Starmer had been in his job for four months by the time bonfire night rolled around.
Yet shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves ruled out the most obvious ways to raise taxes. So, Labour made the electorate a ‘retail offer’ of an additional 40,000 appointments per week to tackle waiting lists, paid for by a crack-down on ‘non-doms’, while insisting there would be no further money without “reform.”
Buying time
When he arrived at the Department of Health and Social Care, new secretary of state Wes Streeting announced that “the policy of this is that the NHS is broken.” He also announced an independent review by Lord Ara Darzi, a surgeon and health minister in Gordon Brown’s government.
In September, Lord Darzi made headlines by declaring that the NHS “is in serious trouble.” But health tech entrepreneur Ravi Kumar said: “there is nothing in there that will surprise people who have been in and around the NHS.”
“There were no surprises in there,” agreed David Hancock, an interoperability expert who has worked for both shared care record and electronic patient record suppliers, “so why do it? The only reason was to buy time.”
Cindy Feddell, a former NHS CIO who now works in Canada agreed, although she felt more urgency was needed. “I thought they would have used the review to launch a plan, but they didn’t,” she said. “It’s very disappointing, because it is a plan we need, not more strategic reviews.”
Diagnosing NHS Failure
Lord Darzi did make a diagnosis of the NHS’ problems that could feed into the 10 Year Health Plan due next January. He argued the root of its challenges lie in the austerity politics of the Cameron/Osborne era, that starved public services of money while driving demand.
He argued these issues were exacerbated by the “calamity without international precedent” of health secretary Andrew Lansley’s reforms in 2012, which fractured NHS structures in a last-ditch attempt to drive competition across the system.
But he also noted that the governments that came before and after these changes have talked about ‘left shift’ reforms without making them stick.
Lord Darzi argued one reason is that they failed to align funding flows with these changes. Plus, he noted, it has become routine to transfer capital funding to the ‘frontline’ – leaving the NHS with crumbling facilities and “stuck in the foothills of digital transformation.”
Reform talk and reality on the ground
When Streeting talks about “reform” these days, he talks about three shifts: from hospital to community, from treatment to prevention, and from analogue to digital.
However, Nicola Haywood-Cleverly, a former chief information officer and trust non-executive director, noted there is a big gap between where the NHS is now, and where these three shifts would take it.
At the moment, she said, NHS England is focused on waiting lists and financial discipline, even if this means cuts in staff or services that pull in a different direction. “I want to know what is going to be different,” she said.
“At the moment, my main concern is there might be a gap between what the Operational Priorities and Planning Guidance [which sets out NHS England’s ‘must dos’ for the service] and the 10 Year Health Plan might say.”
Budget smoke and mirrors
This gap was not closed by the much-anticipated Budget delivered by chancellor Rachel Reeves in October. To fill the “£20 billion black hole” in this year’s public finances, invest in infrastructure, and stabilise public services, Reeves raised taxes by £40 billion and borrowing by £70 billion.
Around half the headline tax increase will go to the NHS, which was promised £22.6 billion over two years. However, this year’s £10.4 billion includes a £1 billion transfer from the capital budget and £1.8 billion for waiting list initiatives announced in the summer.
What’s left will have to cover financial pressures of around £4.8 billion, drug and pay pressures, including changes to employer National Insurance contributions.
“What came out of the Budget was smoke and mirrors, again,” said James Norman, who worked in NHS finance and as a trust CIO and who now works on the supplier side. “It is just covering the pressure that is there; there is nothing new coming down the line.”
In fact, he argued, it’s worse than that, because NHS employers will be covered for the NI changes, but the GPs, third sector, and social care providers who will have to deliver any shift from hospital to community and prevention, won’t. Another example of how talk about reform and reality on the ground are pulling in different directions.
Capital funding mirrors and smoke
The Budget also made a big deal out of promising more capital spending. An additional £3.1 billion was added to next year’s capital budget, taking it to £13.6 billion. Of this, £1.5 billion has been allocated to capacity increases, including additional beds, surgical hubs, and scanners, and £2 billion to “technology and digital.”
However, the advisory board noted that while Streeting talks about a shift from analogue to digital it is virtually impossible to invest in the current climate. “Digital leaders are saying they cannot do anything without going through two or three layers of governance outside their own organisations,” said Nicola Haywood-Cleverly.
“That makes it very hard for suppliers to build a pipeline.” Many trusts are having to freeze vacant non-clinical posts to manage system deficits, reducing their capacity to digest innovation and transformation.
Meantime, it is unclear whether Reeves’ tech spending is new money or, in effect, a re-announcement of the £3.4 billion that her predecessor, Jeremy Hunt, announced for NHS digitisation in March. Certainly, the Treasury ‘red book’ makes no mention of the latter.
Left shift, acute capture
For the advisory board, though, the big question is how the money that is available will be spent. Rizwan Malik, imaging leader, picked up on the promise to invest in community diagnostic centres and scanners. In principle, he argued, this could help to ‘left shift’ services into the community; but in practice many CDCs and new scanners have been attached to acute trusts.
Nicola Haywood-Cleverly argued there are similar issues with virtual community and urgent health care. Some of the innovative projects developed during the Covid-19 pandemic have morphed into virtual wards overseen by acute trusts “so primary and community-led care in its purest sense has been diluted, and become part of the old way of doing things.”
Integrated care boards were set up to create joined up services that still found room for both health and social care providers and innovative ideas. But, as Lord Darzi pointed out, NHS England’s policy focus and funding flows have not moved in the same direction – and nor has investment in IT.
Where’s the enabling tech?
The Treasury red book says Reeves’ £2 billion will “run essential services and drive NHS productivity improvements” while making sure that all trusts have electronic patient records, the NHS has better cyber security, and there are enhancements for the NHS App.
James Norman pointed out it makes no mention of some of the big, enabling technologies that will be needed to ‘left shift’ services and loop in innovative providers or social care. “What has happened to the shared care records?” he asked, as one example.
“They were meant to connect care, by integrating data and letting people see information relevant to them. But in some places people have backed them while in others they’ve been put in at a minimal level and nobody is using them. What’s the plan?”
Big projects, brownfield sites
Just before the advisory board met, the DHSC announced that eleven ‘enabler’ groups have been set up to feed into the 10 Year Health Plan. Encouragingly, there is a digital group, led by NHS England chief data and analytics officer Ming Tang and former national director of transformation Tim Ferris.
However, Ferris is best known for launching the Frontline Digitisation programme to complete the deployment of EPRs at trusts and Tang is leading on the roll-out of Palantir’s Federated Data Platform, which suggests the group may focus on acute IT.
It could also go looking for a ‘big project’. The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change has been making a lot of noise about creating a single, digital health record for every UK citizen within five-years.
But it has failed to answer questions about whether it would build on initiatives like shared care records, or junk them. Advisory board chair Jeremy Nettle raised a similar issue about the NHS App. When it was set up, the app was billed as a “digital front door” for the NHS.
Then NHSX decided it should just provide identity and login services and sign-post people to third-party apps. Now, it’s a mishmash of login and basic functionality; a lot of which is dependent on what GPs allow their patients to see.
“The NHS App shows that it is not just technology that matters,” he said. “It is how it is deployed and how it is used. You need a roadmap and consistent investment to deliver.”
One plan, with technology at its heart
The advisory board also felt that it would be a mistake to develop a 10 Year Health Plan with strategies to support it. Past experience suggests these strategies too easily become menus of options, from which ideas are funded or not-funded according to political interest and the finances available.
Instead, the board argued there should be one plan, that explains how the finance, workforce, and technology available will be used to enable its direction of travel. “We shouldn’t have a 10 Year Health Plan and a tech strategy to go with it,” James Norman argued. “There should be one plan that says how technology will be used to deliver.”
Unfortunately, as Jeremy Nettle pointed out, that won’t be easy to achieve. “The NHS may not be broken, but it’s certainly unwieldy, and its integration with social care is complex, and both are subject to a lot of different pressures that will need sustained effort and investment to address,” he said.
And what about social care?
Social care is a crisis of its own; one that is threatening to bankrupt councils and providers, while not providing adults the care they need. After the main board meeting, Jane Brightman, a social care expert with a special interest in technology, said there had been some measures for the sector in the Budget.
These included £600 million of new grant funding for local authorities, an £86 million increase to the Disabled Facilities Grant to support 7,800 more adaptations to homes to reduce hospitalisations and prolong independence, and an increase to the Carer’s Allowance weekly earnings limit from £151 a week to the equivalent of 16 hours at the National Living Wage (which means carers can earn over £10,000 per year).
There was also an extra £250 million to test new ways of working in children’s social care next year, including a pre-announced £44 million to test allowances for kinship carers and to roll out regional hubs to support the recruitment of foster carers.
Despite these measures, she said there is significant concern that this will not make a dent in the sector’s current problems, or the ones being stored up for the future. The increase in employer National Insurance contributions will also hit the sector hard and could swallow up any additional funding on offer. Despite Labour’s missions to improve and its talk about reforming health and social care, a Fair Pay Agreement for social care workers and a National Care Service have not featured in its first months in government. “Both ideas are welcomed by the sector, but too far down the road to provide the hope that is much needed right now,” Jane said.
A national image sharing platform, used by NHS organisations, patients and others to securely access diagnostic scans and tests, has seen record usage across the country.
The image exchange portal, widely known in the NHS as the IEP, is now being used to share as many as 500 images each second – includingx-rays, CT, MRI, ultrasound scans and more.
The system was first introduced into the NHS in 2009, to allow trusts to share images with each other. Greater reliance on the independent sector to help to tackle diagnostic backlogs, and an increase in patients requesting access to their own images, have contributed to a growth in use of the portal, as more images move beyond organisational boundaries.
Rising volumes of scans and tests taking place for patients has also fuelled growth in the use of the IEP.
Deployed in every acute hospital trust in England, a growing number of organisations beyond NHS trusts have been using the portal – including stroke networks, organisations delivering new insights into cancer, large private healthcare groups, teleradiology reporting providers, and innovative companies helping to create 3D models for pre surgery planning.
In total more than 450,000 individuals currently use the IEP. The portal was used to transmit close to 12 million patient imaging studies in 2023, compared to approximately 2.8 million studies back in 2012.
Chris Scarisbrick, deputy managing director for Sectra, the company which hosts the IEP, said: “The image exchange portal remains globally unique, and is envied as a national tool for sharing diagnostic images for patients.
“Developed for the NHS originally as a means to share radiology imaging between individual hospitals, the role of IEP has changed in line with the needs of a health service now dealing with greater diagnostic demands than ever before.
“As hospitals work hard to tackle a substantial diagnostic backlog, the portal has become an important means to share diagnostic imaging with the independent sector, to help to ensure timely diagnosis for patients. And as more and more ‘ologies’ become digital, it is supporting national access to more than just radiology images.”
Steven Frisby, IEP national account manager at Sectra, added: “Use of the image exchange portal continues to expand in ways that couldn’t have been envisioned 15 years ago when it was first introduced into the NHS.
“Patients are increasingly demanding access to their own imaging. And as medical frontiers expand, and technological capabilities in healthcare continue to evolve, the ability to access imaging through a secure platform, and in ways that protect patient data, is ever more important.
“Now, as the NHS seeks new ways to share images nationally, we welcome conversations on how this national platform can continue to evolve as we ensure it receives the investment needed to meet the needs of healthcare into the future.”
From left to right: EVIES Presenter, Cat Hancock (Believ’s Chief of Staff), Madeleine North (Assistant Planner at Believ), Murray Sirel (Believ’s Head of Product), Luke Templer (Interim Chief Finance Officer at Believ), James Bruce (Head of Bidding at Believ), EVIES presenter)
After a year that has seen Electric Vehicle (EV) Charge point operator (CPO) Believ double its cumulative socket numbers and employee head count, the firm has triumphed in the prestigious Electric Vehicle Innovation and Excellence Awards (EVIEs) winning ‘EV Scale Up of the Year’.
The award recognises both the rapid growth of its ‘all-speeds’ charge point network, and how technical innovation and a commitment to sustainability and social value are driving the best charging experience and helping deliver ‘cleaner air for all’.
The judges were especially impressed by Believ’s ‘very strong consumer feedback’, with drivers rating them 4.6 out of 5 for safety and charging experience, supported by uptime statistics of 99.8% and 98.0% on rapid and fast charge point availability respectively.
The award win was also influenced by Believ’s recent Carbon Neutral Britain and ISO environmental management, health and safety, information security and quality accreditations. A notable technical innovation put forward in Believ’s award submission was ‘Digital Electricity’, a new way to roll out charge point infrastructure quickly and cost effectively. It capitalises on Believ’s close relationship with delivery partner Virgin Media O2 to utilise existing telecom ducts to significantly reduce the need for disruptive installation works, thus making previously commercially unviable sites deliverable.
Guy Bartlett, Believ CEO, says the award is the result of highly experienced and dedicated teams, of which he is extremely proud:
“I am thrilled we have won this award. It is testament to the expertise and unrivalled experience of our teams, as well as a total dedication to deliver on our mission to make sustainable transport available to everyone and deliver cleaner air for all,” he says.
“Our rapid growth and ability to recruit the very best people to drive our mission is thanks to our industry-leading backing from Liberty Global and Zouk Capital. My thanks to all stakeholders for helping us to achieve this important recognition.”
Strategic diversification plan sees the creation of a new position that will extend TTC’s offering to new markets
TTC Group, the learning and development and training experts, has appointed legislation, risk and compliance training professional, Kylie Wilson as Public Sector Director. Her role will focus on developing and managing Public Sector relationships with law enforcement agencies and other entities such as emergency services, regulatory bodies and government agencies.
Kylie Wilson
The new position supports TTC Group’s strategic growth plan, helping the business extend its offering to support the compliance needs of the wider Public Sector.
A highly experienced learning and development (L&D) professional, Kylie was formerly a Detective in Public Protection in the Metropolitan Police and was part of the New Scotland Yard Crime Academy for Detective Training. In this new role, Kylie is responsible for developing and managing relationships with key stakeholders, securing new contract opportunities and developing new product lines. She will also engage with the TTC’s information security strategy to ensure alignment with industry standards and legal requirements, be an ambassador for cyber security and own the business-critical relationship with UKROED, the NDORS programme regulator.
Kylie commented: “Having worked in the public sector for over 15 years, supporting a wide range of organisations, I look forward to the new challenge of building relationships that will support a broad range of employee compliance and training programmes. My background means I have a deep understanding of industry trends and legislation and how best to adapt to changes in the competitive landscape. I am genuinely excited to become a member of the TTC team, helping to further shape the future of its already hugely successful behavioural training offerings.”
Dave Marsh, CEO of TTC added, “As we continue to diversify the TTC Group offering, Kylie’s holistic understanding of the challenges and requirements of the public sector will be invaluable. As an experienced and highly successful training professional, Kylie has both a strong history and deep understanding of the public sector to help ensure TTC training meets the needs of a wide range of organisations. We are thrilled to welcome Kylie to the TTC team and look forward working together to serve existing and new clients and partners.”
The British Army demonstrated the Archer Mobile Howitzer – an artillery system with fully automated gun designed for rapid deployment.
The first in the series of Exercise Dynamic Front 25 involved 5,000 soldiers, including 350 deployed by the British Army.
This is the first time Finland has hosted a major international military exercise since becoming a NATO member in April 2023.
British Army personnel have demonstrated a first live firing of a next-generation howitzer amidst freezing conditions in one of the largest series of NATO artillery exercises ever conducted in Europe.
As temperatures plummeted to -3 degrees Celsius just outside the Arctic Circle, 350 Army personnel joined soldiers from 28 countries – including NATO’s newest member Finland – on Exercise Dynamic Front 25.
During the 12 days of training, which began on the 14 November, the Army demonstrated its capability by conducting its first live firing on exercise with the Archer Mobile Howitzer – an artillery system with fully automated gun designed for rapid deployment. The system, which can fire more than eight rounds a minute at a range of 50km, was procured at speed from Sweden last year.
An Archer Artillery Gun is fired by troops from 19th Regiment Royal Artillery, during a live range on Rovajärvi Training Area during Exercise Dynamic Front, Finland
Also demonstrated in training were the enemy artillery detection radar, TAIPAN, and the UK’s Multiple Launch Rocket System, which can fire up to 12 rockets or missiles in less than a minute.
The training is the first in a wider NATO Dynamic Front 25 series, which takes place across four more countries in the coming months and aims to coordinate live fire artillery capabilities between allied nations from the Arctic Circle to the Black Sea. The exercise reinforces the government’s ‘NATO first’ defence strategy which has seen it set European security as its defence priority and commit to spending 2.5% of GDP on defence.
Minister for the Armed Forces Luke Pollard MP said:
“The successful live firing of the powerful Archer Mobile Howitzer shows we are equipping our Armed Forces with the latest battle-winning weaponry to help keep the UK secure at home and strong abroad.
“This joint exercise reiterates our unshakeable commitment to NATO and demonstrates our collective readiness to meet emerging threats and deter aggression across Europe.”
The exercise focused on advanced NATO technology, with soldiers connecting different military systems from multiple members of the alliance. This allowed shared information to rapidly direct responses across the field.
This comes a month after the UK announced it will strengthen NATO’s eastern flank with a new defence roadmap signed with Estonia. The joint declaration will see thousands of UK troops held at high readiness, ready to defend NATO’s eastern flank, in addition to those deployed in Estonia. It will also boost cooperation on developing long range missiles with NATO Allies, improving the Alliance’s collective air defence and offering opportunities to the UK defence industry.
It is the first time Finland has hosted a major international military exercise since becoming a NATO member following Russia’s illegal full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It takes place as Ukraine marked 1,000 days of the war on 19th November.
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