The eleven separate foreign investments are expected to create 359 jobs across the UK – in London, Leeds, Newcastle and Reading.

These investments – several of which have originated from growing Latin American and Asian markets, including Brazil, Argentina and India – are set to have major benefits for British consumers and businesses.

The investment wins are the result of the Department for International Trade’s work across its extensive network of more than 100 countries, demonstrating to potential foreign investors why the UK continues to be the best place to build a business.

As well as one of the G20’s lowest corporate tax rates, DIT provides businesses with assistance in growing a UK-based workforce, with insights into specific UK sector markets, and much more at invest.great.gov.uk.

International Trade Secretary, Dr Liam Fox said:

It’s easy to see why the UK is Europe’s top destination for foreign direct investment. Our country is home to world leading research and development capability, as well as a culture of innovation.

My international economic department has a network of Trade Commissioners operating across the world, seeking investment opportunities that will help create jobs and improve the lives of people in the UK.

As we celebrate the Lord Mayor’s parade, today’s announcement is further evidence that the UK is one of the most attractive places in the world to invest and demonstrates a vote of confidence in our economy and our people.

The FinTech announcements come ahead of the International Trade Secretary’s attendance at the Lord Mayor’s Show this weekend.

Dr Fox and outgoing Lord Mayor Charles Bowman launched a new FinTech steering board earlier this year, aiming to further propel the success of the sector through a partnership between government, academia and industry.

Some of the investment deals secured include:

• Globant: Argentine software and digital design company that has invested £32 million to expand its ongoing operation in London, creating 140 jobs

• ThinCI: US company specialising in software for artificial intelligence products will create a new site in Leeds, creating 40 jobs

• Avnet: US electronics company has spent £5 million to acquire UK-based information technology company Hanhaa, creating 25 new jobs

Nearly half of Europe’s FinTech ‘unicorns’ are based in London, with app-only bank Monzo the latest company to join the list at the end of October, while the Prime Minister announced £2.3 billion of investment in FinTech during London Tech Week, creating 1,600 jobs.

London is the focal point of the UK’s tech sector, and its information and communications technology market – worth £36 billion – is Europe’s largest. There are over 200,000 digital tech professionals in the capital from across the globe, as well as world-leading universities and tech infrastructure.

Total venture capital investment in UK tech companies since 2016 has surpassed £5 billion, and was more than Germany, Spain, France and Ireland combined last year.

Dinakar Munagalam, CEO of ThinCI said:

The Department for International Trade was very helpful guiding us through the unfamiliar regulatory network for setting up a new venture in the UK. This assistance allowed up to get establish quickly and our newly employed engineers and programmers productive in record time.

What attracted ThinCI to the UK is its talent pool of engineers and programmers that could immediately begin providing the chip design and software development assistance we needed. We found that talent in Leeds and Kings Langley.

Mundeep Nayyar, managing director of Infotel UK said:

The technology sector in Newcastle upon Tyne is estimated to be worth almost £1bn and growing more than twice as fast as the rest of the economy.

With access to leading blue-chip businesses that need Infotel UK’s services and nearly 25,000 students in higher education, the City is the ideal location to find and cultivate new talent and to grow a high-tech software business.

It’s a perfect storm for investment as we look to offer more and better solutions to our clients while maintaining our dedication to quality customer service and delivery.

Director, Paper Plus, Kaushal Shah said:

We at Paper Plus believe in making sustainability the new normal for consumers in the UK and over the world. The expertise and advice of DIT have been a significant accelerator for our business.

The professional knowledge of our DIT advisors is phenomenal and it enhances the credibility of the UK as an excellent place to do business.

Further Information:

Full list of investment deals:

• Eye Capital: Argentine Fintech company which has invested £2 million to open a new London office, creating 10 jobs.

• LHV Pank: Estonian bank which has invested £1 million to open a new London branch creating seven jobs.

• Globant: Argentine software and digital design company that has invested £32 million to expand its ongoing operation in London, creating 140 jobs.

• ThinCI: US company specialising in software for artificial intelligence products will create a new site in Leeds, creating 40 jobs.

• Avnet: US electronics company has spent £5 million to acquire UK-based information technology company Hanhaa, creating 25 new jobs.

• Tradify HQ: NZ-based business organisation software company have invested £1.2 million to build a new office in Reading, creating 14 jobs.

• Infotel: French software company that has invested £1 million to build new premises in Newcastle, creating six jobs.

• Engineer.ai: Global venture capitalists Lakestar, Jungle Ventures & Softbank’s DeepCore have announced that they will invest £22.5 million in this London-based AI company, who will be creating further jobs in addition to the 50 already created.

• Aethra: Brazil’s largest autoparts manufacturer has selected the UK as the location for their new European subsidiary. Their £30 million investment will create 10 jobs over the next four years.

• MKW Engineering: Precision engineering company which, as part of US-owned Simmons and Company International, has announced £9.3 million of investment to secure new premises in North Tyneside. The company are relocating and consolidating their operation in the North East and creating 100 new jobs.

• Paper Plus: UK companies will find it easier than ever before to go green, after DIT assisted this carbon-neutral paper manufacturer to secure £5.5 million of investment from India, expanding their London operation and creating seven new jobs. The company has already saved half a million trees in two years, and will use some of the investment to fund research into biodegradable food packaging.

More than 25,000 domestic abuse survivors will be supported to rebuild their lives thanks to a £22 million allocation for projects across the country, Housing Minister Heather Wheeler MP has announced today (10 November 2018).

Over 60 projects in England will be supported by the funding over the next 2 years – ensuring thousands of survivors have access to the help they need, when they need it.

The money will provide over 2,200 new beds in refuges and other safe accommodation, access to education, and tailored employment and life skills guidance as survivors move towards building a safe and healthy future for themselves and their children – free from domestic abuse.

Projects will be delivered by councils working alongside local organisations to help ensure that no survivor of domestic abuse is turned away from the support they need to start their new life.

Housing Minister Heather Wheeler MP said:

Domestic abuse is a devastating crime, which shatters the lives of survivors and their families. It is our duty to ensure survivors can seek help by providing the support they need to restart their lives.

Through providing specialist accommodation and access to employment, this fund will make sure local authorities and charities can provide a strong safety net for anyone facing the threat of abuse in their own home.

Innovative local projects that will receive a share of funding include:

Portsmouth & Hampshire New Approaches

This project will cover 5 local authority areas providing targeted support designed to meet the needs of those who have experienced domestic violence and abuse. It will provide help to women, children and young people living in refuge accommodation across the region in addition to making it easier for those from BAME and LGBT backgrounds to access support services

Norfolk county council – Norfolk Partnership

Norfolk’s ANCHOR initiative will ensure that any survivor of domestic abuse in Norfolk has access to tailored support for their individual needs to assist them on the path to recovery. It will involve strong partnership working between local organisations to ensure services are effectively joined up. This will build support for those with additional needs, such as mental health and substance misuse and help will also be tailored to those from BAME backgrounds.

Sandra Horley CBE, Chief Executive of Refuge said:

That Refuge services will be supported by this fund is hugely welcome news both for us and particularly for the thousands of women and children we support on a daily basis.

Critically, this funding ensures that many of our refuges will remain open and continue to provide life-saving specialist support to those experiencing domestic abuse. A small number would have been forced to close had we not received these crucial funds.

We are equally delighted to be in a position to now expand one of our services in London, which provides essential support for survivors with additional needs.

In the summer, government announced almost £19 million of funding to expand support for survivors of domestic abuse services across England. This fund has now been extended to £22 million.

This follows previous government funding totalling £20 million during 2016 to 2018, which helped create more than 2,000 bed spaces and gave support to over 19,000 survivors and their families.

Further to this, the government has also published new guidance for councils to prioritise domestic abuse survivors in refuges when allocating social housing and encourages councils to use existing powers to support survivors to remain safely in their own homes if they choose to do so.

The government will shortly be introducing a new landmark Domestic Abuse Bill to further protect and support survivors, recognise the life-long impact domestic abuse has on children and make sure agencies are responding effectively to domestic abuse.

We are also committed to reviewing how domestic abuse services are commissioned and funded across England and will set out next steps shortly.

See the full list of allocations (PDF, 125KB, 6 pages) for the £22 million fund.

The Domestic Abuse Fund was launched on 2 July 2018. It was originally launched as an £18.8 million fund.

The funding builds on other actions being taken by the government to end domestic abuse, support survivors and ensure offenders are prosecuted. Such as:

• allocation of a £20 million fund for local authorities working in partnership with services providers to boost services between 2016 and 2018
• a new domestic abuse offence to capture coercive and controlling behaviour, the criminalisation of forced marriage and the introduction of new stalking laws
• a national roll-out of domestic violence protection orders and the domestic violence disclosure scheme
• the £15 million 3-year Violence Against Women and Girls Service Transformation Fund
• the government previously held a consultation titled Improving access to social housing for victims of domestic abuse from October 30, 2017 to January 5, 2018. This consultation outlined proposals for new statutory guidance to councils to assist survivors of domestic abuse in refuges to access social housing.

Thank you very much Mr President. I wanted to start by apologising for my absence at the start of this debate. I left the chamber to go to a Remembrance service for the hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I. I think it’s very good and thank China that we’re having this debate day so close to that anniversary, which started the march to multilateralism in earnest, even though some foundations had been laid in the previous century. And of course the end of World War II saw the creation of the United Nations and the United Nations be the apex of the [rules-based international] system that, on the whole, has kept us all safe and prosperous since 1945.

I wanted too to say at the outset how grateful we are to the United States for giving the United Nations its home here in New York and for their contribution, without which many of the gains of the preceding almost 70 years could not have been made.

I’d like to speak on three themes today: One, on collective challenges; one on the particular role of the Security Council; and one on what we now need to do, in our view, to strengthen multilateralism.

In my own country, public debate on foreign policy issues nearly always features as a reference to the need for a solution to be pursued through the United Nations, no matter where on the political spectrum the comment is made from. Post-Brexit you will find the United Kingdom an even more active participant in the affairs of the UN and of global affairs more generally.

Mr President, 70 years ago no one could accuse the UN founding fathers of a lack of ambition but since its foundation, the United Nations has faced an almost unbridgeable gap between its ambition and our ability to help it deliver.

Important gains have been made. Kofi Annan spoke of pushing heavy rocks to the top of the hill, even though some had eluded our grasp and that we needed to keep going. What I wanted to stress Mr President was that whatever country’s economic or security model, all the evidence shows that countries thrive best if they have open societies, if they pursue open trade, open speech, open association and open information.

A rules-based international system which preserves stability is in the interests of the vast majority of the member states of this organisation but, as many of you have identified today, we face a proliferation of threats from many quarters. We have heard a lot of reference to those today. Some of them have been the cause of great dispute in this Council but they are all relevant to the entire membership, whether you are on the Council, electing a member of the Council or standing for election yourself. No nation can protect its people without engaging positively in the crises that affect the world. I cannot see a single major threat that can be solved by one nation alone, whether it’s migration, cybercrime, modern day slavery, terrorist threats, disease or climate change. All these threats challenge security and prosperity at home and they challenge collective security. They can be resolved only by collective action on the world’s stage.

But effective collective action Mr President, can not only mean action by consensus. Threats to international peace and security, by their nature, often involve a challenge to international law and norms. It logically cannot be the case that action to uphold international peace and security must always be by consensus; that will not be sufficient.

You, Mr President, spoke of the need for the Security Council to act with unity, wisdom and courage. Our collective wisdom tells us that inaction in the face of gross abuses of human rights and violations of international law – acts of genocide, acts of using prohibited weapons – [like chemical weapons] – leads to disastrous outcomes and hence we fail to uphold international peace and security because we lack the courage to act on the wisdom we display. We end up being disunited.

From Rwanda to Srebrenica, to current conflicts in Myanmar and Syria, we are failing the cause of multilateralism by failing to act in line with the Charter. The United Nations Security Council was invested with powers under Chapter VII of the Charter in order to fulfil its duties to maintain international peace and security, but if we are blocked by one or two members from using those powers, that is not a legitimate expression of the Charter but an abuse of the power of the veto.

Mr President, we completely share the views of those Security Council members who spoke about the importance of Chapter VI and Chapter VIII of the Charter relating to the Security Council. To that I would also add Article 99 which we believe is underused – the ability of the Secretary-General to draw matters to the Security Council’s attention.

But I want to stress Mr President that under Chapter VI, the Security Council may investigate any dispute or any situation that may give rise to a dispute and may determine whether or not it constitutes international friction and endangers the maintenance of international peace and security. The Charter does not require the Security Council already to agree that such a threat exists, and it is our view Mr President that the more some countries try and stifle Security Council discussion of these situations under Chapter VI- for example, when a government is attacking its own people or abusing its neighbours – the more likely it is, if Chapter VI is stifled, that more dramatic action will be needed eventually under Chapter VII. That’s an irony Mr President, that I think the Security Council should do well to reflect on.

A rules-based international system Mr President must, of course, adapt to thrive. It must even adapt if it wants to survive. A number of speakers today have called attention to the importance of supporting reform, and I would like to add the UK’s voice that as well, and I would say that that includes Security Council reform.

I think we must also redouble our efforts to defend the rules-based international order. We need multilateral organizations that are fit for purpose. We need to reform outdated and bureaucratic structures. This is the best way to make sure that the institutions do not collapse. We need WTO reform so that we succeed in warding off the dangerous temptations of protectionism and we need World Bank reform so that its governance reflects the changing balance of the global economy. We need to strengthen the invisible chain that links democracies and we must also ensure though, at the same time, that we are better at acting in concert when we face real and present threats.

[I have two difficult messages for member states today. The first is that the rules-based international system requires us all to uphold it; we cannot pick and choose the rules we would like to adhere to. Secondly, we must collectively but robustly confront that minority of states who defy this collective will. If you use chemical weapons, and a UN investigation finds that you have done so, we cannot sit in this Chamber and talk about the importance of multilateral solutions without talking about it. Sovereignty isn’t a license to play fast and loose with international rules and norms; it isn’t a license to abuse and attack your own people; it isn’t a license to annex other people’s territory. The P5 have a particular role in this regard, whether your preferred reading is President Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Stan Lee: with great power comes great responsibility.]

Mr President, we would see one of the most important things as a renewed commitment from all members of the Council but also all members of the General Assembly, a more a stronger commitment to responsibility and partnership from both state and non-state actors – civil society, the private sector. It is all about what we can do together as we move towards the seventieth anniversary of the United Nations in 2020.

The SDGs are the most supreme, if you like, manifestation of this goal. And this goal is all the more important as we grapple with new and disruptive technologies, like artificial intelligence and cyber which will change the way governments interact with each other and with their own citizens.

So while the United Kingdom Mr President strongly agrees with the premise of this debate, we know that we must be vigilant against the tendency of this subject to become an exercise in mutual adoration. In conflicts, atrocities are committed and international laws are breached. An increase in the use of multilateralism should never be coded language for negotiating agreements with those who have violated the rules of our international system.

Thank you Mr President.

[Please note: remarks in square brackets were in the original version of this statement but were not delivered in the Council].

Dr Dave Tudor, previously Head of Manufacturing Strategy for GlaxoSmithKline, has been appointed Managing Director of the Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre, a unique facility offering transformative solutions in small molecule and fine chemical manufacturing, funded by UK Research and Innovation through the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund.

As Managing Director, Dr Tudor will be responsible for delivering the business strategy for the Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre, which is a collaboration between the Centre for Process Innovation, the University of Strathclyde, GSK and AstraZeneca. The Centre is supported by a £13 million investment from UK Research and Innovation, through the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund, along with £15 million from Scottish Enterprise and £7 million from both GSK and AstraZeneca.

Dr Dave Tudor said:

I’m excited to begin my role as Managing Director of the Centre and to have the chance to create a transformative strategy for life science in the UK. My aim is to connect the industry and bring partners together to work in a non-competitive way. What really motivates me is the idea that we can avoid waste, reduce costs and make these medicines more accessible and more affordable. Anything that can be done to transform the product and make it cheaper has got to be a good thing.

Dr Ian Campbell, Executive Chair for Innovate UK and joint- responsible officer for the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund said:

The Medicines Manufacturing Centre will be a major facility and a jewel in the crown for the UK’s life sciences sector. I’m very pleased that we have managed to attract someone of Dave Tudor’s calibre, experience and connections. His appointment demonstrates the value that the industry sees in the investment the Government is making through the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund.

With over 27 years of leadership experience, Dr Tudor will help the Centre to achieve its ultimate goal of lowering the cost of drugs, which will make healthcare more affordable for providers and patients.

After completing a PhD in Chemistry from Glasgow University, Dr Tudor joined SmithKline Beecham in 1992 and moved to GSK in 1997. He has held various management and leadership positions throughout his 27 years working in the pharmaceutical industry. Since 2011, he has served on the Board of Directors for Chemical Industry Association, the Chemical Growth Partnership, the Glasgow Economic Board and various UK Innovation Centres.

Dr Tudor has been involved with the Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre since its inception, and will be using his role as Managing Director to investigate how the UK can drive more value from life science research and development.

The Centre aims to address the key challenges facing the pharmaceutical sector by bringing industry, academia and government together to accelerate the translation of technology and provide a better economic return for the sector. It will enable new and disruptive technologies to be proven at scale. This will allow the rapid adoption of next-generation processes that reduce risk, cut costs and save time.

Andy Jones, ISCF Medicines Manufacturing Challenge Director, said:

I’m looking forward to working closely with Dave Tudor and his whole team to drive this crucial phase of turning the Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre from plans into reality. The Centre is a vital new facility for the whole of the UK, both in terms of saving more lives and creating even better conditions for Life Sciences companies to thrive and grow in a fiercely competitive global market.

Located in the Advanced Manufacturing Innovation District in Renfrewshire, Scotland, the Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre aims to attract over £80 million of R&D investment by 2028 and will create 80 high value jobs by 2023. While its premises are under construction, the staff of the Centre will be based in the University of Strathclyde’s Technology and Innovation Centre Zone.