Bristol-based Open Bionics will take its bespoke 3D-printed prosthetic arms to even more children and young people, after attracting £4.6 million from investors.

The Williams F1 team’s Foresight Williams, Downing LLP and Ananda Impact Ventures co-led the investment with £1.5 million each, with additional funding from Rathbone Nominees.

This deal will allow Open Bionics to scale up its manufacturing capabilities to serve the UK and overseas markets, including the United States.

For the individual

Prostheses for children and young people need to meet their changing requirements as they grow and be suitable for a diverse range of activities while they learn and play.

Open Bionics developed its Hero Arm to meet this challenge. Using 3D printing, it has created a low-cost bionic arm that is lightweight, adjustable and offers multi-grip capabilities.

Control is via sensors that detect and respond to movement in the upper arm muscles. The device can be used by children as young as 9-years-old.

Used by the NHS and other healthcare providers

Development of the Hero Arm was supported by a contract with NHS England that used SBRI Healthcare – part of the Innovate UK Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI), which helps innovative businesses work with big public sector organisations to implement new technologies.

Open Bionics was awarded £697,464 to support clinical trials of its bionic limbs for child amputees. This helped to get the product medically-certified. It is now available through the NHS and other national healthcare systems including in France and Germany, as well as private sales.

The business also enjoys commercial licences with Disney, Marvel and Pixar to accessorise its prosthetics with superhero characters and further its appeal to children.

Reaching a global market

Samantha Payne, co-founder and COO of Open Bionics, said:

This funding enables us to serve multiple international markets.

We’re thrilled to finally be able to deliver bionic hands to amputees and people with limb differences in the USA.

Twelve organisations working to improve the lives of LGBT people in the UK have been awarded government funding, as new research published today (1 February) shows how much public attitudes to same sex relationships have changed in 30 years.

To mark the start of LGBT History month, organisations supporting LGBT people in education, healthcare and the community, will receive a share of £2.6million as part of the government’s LGBT Action Plan.

Today’s announcement comes as new research shows that in 2017 68% of people said same-sex relations were ‘not at all wrong’, up from 47% in 2012, 39% in 2007 and just 11% in 1987. The report also showed 80% of people age 18-24 thought there was nothing wrong with same sex-relations.

‘Attitudes to Equalities: the British Social Attitudes Survey 2017’, funded by the Government Equalities Office, also found that the proportion of people viewing same-sex relations as ‘always’ or ‘mostly’ wrong, has also declined over time, from 74% in 1987, to 36% in 2007, 28% in 2012, and 17% in 2017.

Minister for Equalities, Baroness Susan Williams, said:

Everyone should be able to love who they wish to and live their life free from fear and discrimination, and I am encouraged to see how people’s attitudes are changing to be more accepting and more tolerant.

However, we still have work to do to make sure our society is truly fair. That’s why we are working with charities, schools, GPs, and across government to make sure our Action Plan can bring about real, lasting change for LGBT people in the UK.

Today’s grant funding from the GEO has been awarded to:

• Barnardo’s, Diversity Role Models, Equaliteach, National Children’s Bureau, Stonewall and The Diana Award will split £1million of the funding to extend work that protects children from homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying. Currently the initiative, delivered by Barnardo’s and Stonewall, has supported 1200 schools in England, with the grant funding set to help that continue until March 2020
• Advonet, LGBT Foundation, London Friend, Mind in the City, Hackney and Waltham Forest, and the Royal College of General Practitioners which have been awarded a share of £1million to improve LGBT people’s health and social care
• The LGBT has been allocated £200,000 to deliver training and development to LGBT sector organisations to help them grow, mature and become more sustainable over time. The Consortium will also distribute up to £400,000 of grant funding to voluntary and community groups to support LGBT community initiatives across England including annual Pride events

As part of the Action Plan the GEO will also be commissioning research on:

• Homeless LGBT people – in partnership with the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government , GEO has commissioned research with homeless LGBT people and housing and support providers. This research will be used in the annual refresh of the Rough Sleeping Strategy, due in autumn 2019
• Conversion therapy – this research will involve speaking to people who have experience of conversion therapy in the UK, following government’s promise to end the abhorrent practice of conversion therapy

The LGBT Action Plan, published in July last year, made more than 75 commitments to tackle discrimination and improve the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in the UK. These included commitments to end the practice of conversion therapy, continue to tackle homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying in schools, and establish an LGBT Advisory Panel to guide the government on decisions affecting LGBT people.

The plan was published alongside the results of the largest national survey of LGBT people ever undertaken. The survey, which had over 108,000 respondents, shows LGBT people are experiencing prejudice daily. A new tool, which will allow academics, journalists and the public to access anonymous data from the survey for their own analysis will be launched 7 February.

Notes to editors:

• Attitudes to equalities: the British Social Attitudes Survey 2017’ includes full results for questions funded by the GEO in the National Centre for Social Research’s annual British Social Attitudes Survey, including questions on same-sex relations, prejudice against transgender people, and body image. Selected findings, relating to gender division of labour, occupational segregation, and harassment were previously featured in NatCen’s annual British Social Attitudes report, published in July 2018

• The 2017 British Social Attitudes survey consists of 3,988 interviews with a representative, random sample of adults in Britain. Interviews were carried out between June and November 2017. The 2017 figure featured in this press release is based on responses from 3004 people NatCen interviewed in England, Scotland and Wales

• The LGBT survey was launched in July 2017. The LGBT Action Plan can be found here

• The organisations awarded bid funding will start work immediately

The Charity Commission, the independent regulator of charities in England and Wales, has opened a statutory inquiry into The Albayan Education Foundation Limited (1128083). The inquiry was opened on 13 December 2018.

The charity, whose objects include the advancement of education and the relief of individuals living in the UK and overseas who are in need or hardship, also runs a school in Birmingham. That school has been issued with a number of critical reports by Ofsted, and statutory notices by the Department for Education under section 114(5) of the Education and Skills Act 2008.

None of these issues triggered the trustees to report a serious incident to the Commission, as would have been expected under our serious incident reporting regime.

The regulator has previously engaged with the charity, issuing an action plan to the charity’s trustees aimed at improving the governance, management and administration of the charity.

However the trustees have failed to implement the action plan fully leading the Commission to have serious concerns about the ongoing viability of the charity; as a result, the Commission has opened an inquiry which will examine the governance, management and administration of the charity by its trustees, including:

• whether the trustees have complied with and fulfilled their duties and responsibilities as trustees under charity law;
• whether the trustees have complied with the requirements of other regulators, in particular the DfE;
• the financial controls and management of the charity’s funds and accounting procedures;

It is the Commission’s policy, after it has concluded an inquiry, to publish a report detailing what issues the inquiry looked at, what actions were undertaken as part of the inquiry and what the outcomes were. Reports of previous inquiries by the Commission are available on GOV.UK.

Ends

Notes to Editors

1. The Charity Commission is the regulator of charities in England and Wales. To find out more about our work see the about us page on GOV.UK.
2. Search for charities on our check charity tool.
3. Section 46 of the Charities Act 2011 gives the Commission the power to institute inquiries. The opening of an inquiry gives the Commission access to a range of investigative, protective and remedial legal powers.

We got the callout just minutes before 4pm on30 January from police Scotland who had received a report that there was a fallen climber in the Cairngorms with a suspected broken ankle.

The Inverness coastguard helicopter – which was out training at the time – took a little over 10 minutes to arrive on scene in a bid to reach the casualty before the weather closed in.

With the assistance of Cairngorms mountain rescue team, they used the full length of their winch cable – 296ft – due the extreme turbulent conditions to airlift the climber, who was safely roped onto steep ground.

The casualty was then flown to Raigmore hospital. A second climber, who was the injured man’s climbing buddy, was uninjured but cragfast had to be assisted down the mountain by the Cairngorms mountains rescue team.

Speaking after the rescue, the Inverness coastguard helicopter crew said: “Trying to land a helicopter in these conditions is just not going to happen. Getting any closer to the mountain and we would have risked causing an avalanche. It must have seemed like a long time for us to reach the climber but this was the safest thing we could do under these treacherous conditions. This was a great team effort between us and the Cairngorms mountain rescue team, who we think are real heroes for bearing the conditions so well and taking the second casualty off the mountain.”

Cairngorms rescue

Published 1 February 2019

Minister Grace Fu, Minister for Culture, Community and Youth, Your Excellencies, my co-editor Prof Tommy Koh, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen:

I would like to begin by adding my thanks to all of you, but especially to the minister, for joining us here this evening and supporting this project. And like Prof Koh, I must thank, too, all of the contributors to this collection of essays. I’m very happy that some of you have been able to join us here today.

The authors of the essays are the people who have done the real work, drawing on their deep research and personal experience to help us tell the story – the good, the bad and the ugly – of a unique relationship. Prof Koh has explained to you some of the contents of the book and why we thought it would be interesting and useful to bring them together in one volume.

My personal hope is that the book and the individual essays will be seen as a constructive contribution to the collective reflection that the bicentennial of the establishment of a trading post in Singapore by Raffles and Farquhar has stimulated here.

It has been interesting for me to observe in the last 12 months how many different views there are in Singapore on the significance of the anniversary, on the impact of British rule and administration, on what it means to be Singaporean.

Not surprisingly, this has intensified since the turn of the year. I consider this robust discussion to be a thoroughly good thing. It is good that people should exchange views and debate such questions. It’s good that they should have different opinions.There are of course no right answers to the questions. There is no single truthful version of history. There are no uniquely correct interpretations of historical events. So it’s very healthy that people should be encouraged to question what they’re being told rather than meekly accepting the authorised version, as still happens in too many countries around the world.

These discussions and debates are more productive and are more useful if they are well informed. Hearsay, rumour and deliberate disinformation, whether on or offline, are the handmaidens of misunderstanding and prejudice. Ignorance and misrepresentation fan the flames of hatred and xenophobia. But thanks to the efforts of our contributing authors, I believe participants in the debate about how Singapore became what it is today will be better informed if they read this book.

I hope too that British readers of the book will gain a better understanding of the people, the forces and the events that have shaped modern Singapore and which help to explain what drives this remarkable place and motivates its citizens and leaders. They will see how Singaporeans took some of the institutions and approaches developed by the colonial administration and then adapted, updated and applied them, invariably much more effectively than their predecessors. The results are all around us and indeed embodied in the Singaporeans in this auditorium.

Too few people in the UK – and in Europe generally – are aware of what is happening in this part of the world of the pace of change, of the dynamism to be found throughout the region.Too many in the UK at least project on to Singapore their pre-conceived political views, without bothering themselves with the reality. I hope that in a small way this book may reduce that tendency.

In anniversary years such as this, it’s natural for us to look back, to rediscover and reappraise the past. That is what Prof Koh and I have tried to do in this book. But in my role as High Commissioner, my day job is to deal with the present and look to the future. And I’m glad to say that the present state of the bilateral relationship is strong. Whether it’s in the economic sphere, with over 4000 British companies with a presence in Singapore and with extensive Singaporean investment in the UK.

Or in science and innovation with so many research collaborations between our scientists it’s impossible for us to keep track of them all. Or in education with 7000 young Singaporeans studying in the UK, another 50000 studying in Singapore for British qualifications and more and more young Brits spending time at NUS or NTU or SMU as part of their studies. Or in defence and security, with a Singaporean regularly being selected as the top overseas student at our Staff Colleges and with four Royal Naval vessels visiting Singapore in the space of 12 months.

Yet while the relationship is strong, the potential is there for it to deepen further. And that is why our two Foreign Ministers, Dr Vivian Balakrishnan and Jeremy Hunt, launched our new SG-UK Partnership for the Future on 4 January during the Foreign Secretary’s recent visit to Singapore. Through this Partnership we can take our relationship to a new level. So while our shared history is rich – as I think we capture in this book – our shared future can be even brighter.

Thank you again to all of you for coming this evening. Thank you Minister. Thank you to the National Museum of Singapore for allowing us to use the facilities here. I feel it to be a particularly appropriate venue, not just because of the subject of the book but because my wife Anne has spent so many hours here as a docent, learning about Singapore’s history and sharing her knowledge with others, Singaporeans and foreigners.

It’s a happy coincidence that my parents are able to be here this evening and in true Academy Awards fashion I want to thank them for their love and support. I’m very grateful to everyone at SPH, above all to our editor Kelly Pang, for their support for the project. Thank you to my colleagues from Eden Hall who have helped arrange this event but more generally for the High Commission and British interests in Singapore.

Ladies and gentlemen, as I say in my Foreword to the book, I was deeply honoured when Prof Koh made me an offer I couldn’t refuse to co-edit this volume with him. Tommy, every one of my colleagues in the Diplomatic Corps has nothing but the greatest respect, admiration and affection for you as a legal scholar, an outstanding diplomat, and as a person. Honestly, it is one of the proudest moments of my professional life to see my name alongside yours on the cover of this book.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity. I hope you all enjoy the book.