Tag Archives: HM Government

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is making 3 changes, which are intended to provide additional guidance to merging companies, streamline the CMA’s process and reduce the requirements on businesses.

Initial enforcement orders

The first change is the publication of additional guidance on the CMA’s use of IEOs. These are orders that may be put into place during its investigations to prevent merging companies from integrating in a way that could affect the outcome or interfere with the CMA’s ability to introduce any necessary measures.

The guidance, which reflects comments received in a recent consultation, provides further clarification on:

• the circumstances in which an IEO will typically be imposed;
• the form that an IEO will typically take;
• the types of derogations that the CMA is likely to grant; and
• the timing for imposing and revoking IEOs and granting derogations.

Merger notice form

The CMA has also made a number of changes to the merger notice form, reflecting comments received in a recent consultation, that are intended to reduce the overall amount of information that businesses need to provide.

The changes include making the form clearer to understand, eliminating unnecessary questions and providing additional guidance on what information is and isn’t likely to be required by the CMA in any given case.

Revised guidance on the CMA’s mergers intelligence function

Finally, the CMA has also made some minor amendments to the guidance on its merger intelligence function. In particular, the updated guidance clarifies the point at which merging companies who do not propose to notify their transaction to the CMA should submit a briefing note.

It won’t surprise air aware readers that, whilst deployed on or supporting an exercise, an increased level of risk is often found in relation to normal home base activities. An internal Military Aviation Authority (MAA) study into joint exercises in early 2016 concluded that the MAA should conduct detailed analysis of available exercise data – to further investigate why hazards are increased when conducting exercise activity.

A military exercise can be defined as the employment of military resources in training for operations, either exploring the effects of warfare or testing strategies without actual combat. In recent years Aviation has been critical to the success of such exercises whether supporting Counter Insurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan or, more recently, supporting defence as it returns to more contingent style operations. The aim of military exercises is the creation of professional resilient aircrew and support staff who can successfully perform in the complex battlespace of the 21st Century; whilst also ensuring the combat readiness of deployable forces prior to deployment. Exercises provide the means to practice, develop, and validate, within constraints, the practical application of a common doctrine: from small single aircraft individual training exercises, to Squadron collective training events right through to larger Tier 2 and 3 exercises such as the JOINT WARRIOR series, RED FLAG and COUGAR deployments. The MAA study found a healthy reporting culture from units deployed on exercise returning around 500-600 exercise related Defence air safety occurrence reports (DASOR) per year from 2010 to 2016. The analysis also found that the level of pre-exercise planning and preparation and first party assurance, whilst deployed, was of a high standard -with air safety risks captured and exploited in detailed post exercise reports across the three services. Nevertheless, aviation exercise planners and support staff should remind themselves of Regulatory Article (RA) 2305(6) ‘Air exercise planning and airspace integration regulation’.

To capture and understand air safety issues on exercise it was decided to bracket the data by time, and to identify air safety issues from aviation exercises between 2010 and 2016. This time window is of particular interest as it focuses on both aviation exercises supporting Op HERRICK 2010-14 (MST and environmental) and aviation’s switch to more contingency era operations from circa 2014 to date. Given the increased importance of Air Land Integration (ALI) capabilities post Op HERRICK, Op ELLAMY, Op TELIC and a focus on the ‘whole force’ approach to operations (CJIM-Combined Joint, Inter agency and Multinational), a broader and more complex set of exercise scenarios has developed which may suggest the spike in reporting form 2014. It was also noted that due to continuing operations such as Op SHADER not all forces have been able to return to contingency, which may account for gaps in exercise reporting from some force elements.

All readers will be aware that military exercises pose additional risks and hazards to personnel across the four worlds and the 3700 DASOR identified in this 6 year time bracket identified certain themes. The list below, whilst not exclusive, for those not already familiar across the aviation environment will serve as a useful refresher.

Healthcare UK is supporting a large project in India to create a network of 11 Medicities across the country. The Indo-UK Institute of Health (IUIH) programme is one of the world’s largest healthcare initiatives currently underway. It aims to partner with key NHS providers to transform the provision of quality healthcare and medical education services across India.

The scope of the project

IUIH’s vision is to provide integrated healthcare across India by partnering with global leaders in research, education, technology, manufacturing and health care delivery.

The project led by Dr. Ajay Gupta, Group MD and CEO, IUIH will deliver a staged rollout of healthcare services across 100 cities. It will involve the development of 11 Medicities along with a network of primary care clinics across India. The project is envisaged to take 10 years to complete, with the first phase already underway.

Exporting NHS healthcare services to India

Each Medicity will be developed in partnership with a leading NHS Trust under a commercial contract. This commitment by the Indian government and IUIH has already recorded over £150 million in export wins for the UK since 2015 and continues to grow. The scale of this project signifies significant export opportunities for NHS Trusts and other healthcare services providers throughout India.

The NHS partner for the first 2 sites at Nagpur and Amravati respectively, is Kings College Hospital (KCH). Healthcare UK was responsible for introducing Dr Ajay Gupta (IUIH) to KCH. Lord Kerslake, Chairman of Kings College sees the role of KCH as “bringing healthcare expertise and advice to the project”.

Foundation stone laying ceremonies at 2 major Medicity sites

In the last couple of weeks, high profile foundation stone laying ceremonies have been held at the first 2 Medicity sites at Nagpur and Amravati. This milestone is a major step forward and owes a great deal to 2.5 year’s hard work by Healthcare UK and the Department for International Trade (DIT) India who have provided significant support and guidance to IUIH.

Local press releases cover the stone laying ceremonies in more detail. Chief Ministers of the 2 states where the sites are located attended the ceremonies. These articles show the scale and importance of the project to the development of India’s healthcare system:

Times of India

The Indian Express

Train derailed at Paddington station, London, 20 August 2017.

Lightweight energy-saving carriages, software telling passengers how busy arriving trains are, and personalised ticket machines that help customers with their ongoing journeys are just some of the projects that have won funding in the government’s railways innovation scheme.

Now another £7.9 million is on offer to develop cutting-edge ways to improve the network for passengers in the next round of the Accelerating Innovation in Rail (AIR) scheme, run by the Department for Transport (DfT) in partnership with Innovate UK.

The competition is open to companies of all sizes across the UK, but all entries must be collaborative, involving at least two different organisations and at least one SME. Entries will be accepted from 18 September to 15 November 2017.

Rail Minister Paul Maynard said:

We want to see ideas that improve reliability on the network for passengers. We have a wealth of pioneering, innovative companies out there ready to put their ideas into practice.

This is about nurturing innovation on the railways and about developing trains that are less reliant on complex and expensive infrastructure.

We want to tap into these inventive and ground-breaking ideas for the benefit of rail passengers across the country, and to support the biggest modernisation programme in rail since the Victorian era.

The last funding round in March this year attracted a diverse range of entries, including designing automated vehicles to carry out track inspections, improving trackside drainage to cut delays and line closures, and software to predict when potential train breakdowns might occur

The funding has been allocated through a rigorous assessment process involving experts from the industry, and has attracted up to £4 million in private sector finance as well. Following successful testing and demonstration, successful projects will have the potential to be rolled out across the network.