A partnership building on the UK’s heritage and excellence in regulation will ensure the UK is at the forefront of the next regulation revolution – creating an environment which fosters and supports entrepreneurship and the innovative industries of the future from flying taxis to digital lawyers – was announced yesterday by the Business Secretary Greg Clark.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, the Business Secretary confirmed the UK would establish a new partnership with the World Economic Forum Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, based in San Francisco, to develop future regulation which benefits business and consumers.

New technology is rapidly changing and creating entirely new industries, products and ways of serving customers with digital platforms improving the quality, speed, and price of a range of services from shopping and parking to streaming entertainment and travel. But alongside these economic opportunities come a range of ethical, legal and consumer protection issues which will require an active and agile response from regulators.

Business Secretary Greg Clark said:

The speed of technological innovation across the globe is faster than ever. New technology is not only revolutionising existing products and services, it is creating whole new industries and business models. The UK is recognised across the world for its regulatory environment which achieves both the protection of consumers whilst maintaining an openness to innovation – a framework which has been exported across the world.

Our regulators have a fundamental role in ensuring the success of future industries and innovations through active and agile governance whilst ensuring the protection of consumers.

The government sees active and agile regulators as key to creating the business environment in which the industries of the future can grow, as part of our modern Industrial Strategy. This new international collaboration will ensure the UK leads the way in guaranteeing the UK and global regulatory system keeps pace with the speed of change.

The United Kingdom is the first country to partner with the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution on this project, building on its existing collaboration with the Centre on artificial intelligence.

The partnership work will focus on areas of innovation which align with the UK’s Industrial Strategy Grand Challenges, such as:

• AI and Machine learning
• Autonomous and Urban Mobility
• Drones and Tomorrow’s Airspace
• Precision medicine

The move reflects the government’s commitment to ensuring that UK regulators are agile and ready for and to foster the industries of the future. In October 2018 the OECD reported the UK as a world leader, recognising the supportive and exceptional performance of the UK’s regulatory system in its annual Regulatory Policy Outlook.

The UK has been pioneering an agile approach to regulation, such as the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) introducing a ‘regulatory sandbox’ in 2016, allowing innovative businesses to work with the regulator to test products with consumers without having to meet all the usual requirements for compliance. This allows innovators to benefit from better market testing and consumers to benefit from new products which have better safeguards built-in from the beginning.

The Business Secretary has been leading efforts in the government, through a Ministerial Working Group on regulation, to transform the UK’s regulatory system towards this agile approach. This involves continuously identifying new opportunities and driving regulatory reform; making regulations technology neutral and framing our laws around the goals we want to achieve; and creating more space for experimentation with a greater emphasis on testing and trialling new innovations.

Kay Firth-Butterfield, Head Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning at the World Economic Forum said:

I am delighted that BEIS will be joining the work of the Forum around agile governance of 4IR technologies. I look forward to working with them on the AI Team’s ‘Reimagining the regulator‘ project, where their work on regulatory models will be very valuable.

In October 2018 the Business Secretary awarded £10 million to 15 projects through the government’s Regulators’ Pioneer Fund to help unlock the potential of emerging technologies, from robolawyers to flying taxis. To support innovations to come to market, regulators as diverse as the UK Space Agency and the Care Quality Commission launched new initiatives to boost engagement with innovators in their sectors.

The government’s Modernising Consumer Markets green paper set out how regulators should ensure that consumers are not being unfairly penalised by suppliers who hold information on their behaviour as well as looking at how their own data can be made more accessible to consumers and making it easier for people to switch to better value services.

Following a competitive procurement process, the Environment Agency awarded the contract as part of a continued drive to work with partners to ensure freshwater fisheries thrive and encourage more people to go angling throughout England.

The contract will run for up to 4 years and is worth £1.15 million a year. It is funded by income from fishing licence sales.

The priorities for the contract include:

• recruiting and retaining more anglers,
• providing expert advice on tackling non-native or invasive species, reducing predation and discouraging littering,
• sharing important information with anglers on the fisheries issues that matter to them through social media and face-to-face forums; and
• building effective enforcement partnerships with the police, angling clubs and fishery owners through the Voluntary Bailiff Service and Building Bridges project (aimed at educating and integrating migrant anglers about England’s angling laws and rules).

These services complement the Environment Agency’s regulatory work to protect and improve fisheries through monitoring and managing fish stocks.

Kevin Austin, Environment Agency Head of Fisheries, said:

This contract continues the Environment Agency’s commitment to work with partners to deliver our fisheries priorities for anglers. Through commissioning work with partners we aim to secure the best future for angling by making fishing licence income go further. We are delighted to be working with the Angling Trust on this endeavour.

Mark Lloyd, chief executive of the Angling Trust, said:

We are thrilled to have been awarded this contract and our ambition is to go above and beyond the requirements of the contract wherever possible. Both organisations are committed to protecting and improving freshwater angling. The Angling Trust offers a very cost-effective way of delivering this work because of our extensive network and unique access to match funding.

Notes to editors

• The current National Angling Strategic Services contractual arrangements are due to end on 31st March 2019 and the new contract will commence on 1st April. The contract will initially be until 31st March 2021, with an option for a further 2 years.
• The contract was procured through an advert in the Official Journal of the European Union. Interested organisations who passed a pre-qualification questionnaire were formally invited to tender for the work.
• The award of the new contract was made on an evaluation of bids based on cost and technical quality.
• Negotiations continue with the Angling Trust on finalising the contractual arrangements for the new service.

Published 23 January 2019

At around 16:30 hrs on 6 January 2019, an engineering train travelling on a falling gradient was unable to stop and collided with the gate protecting the A4085 road, coming to rest across the carriageway. The gate was damaged, but no injuries were reported.

We have undertaken a preliminary examination into the circumstances surrounding this accident. Having assessed the evidence which has been gathered to date, we have decided to publish a safety digest.

The safety digest will be made available on our website in the next few weeks.

Published 23 January 2019

More than 50% of children in state-funded schools in England are now taught in an academy or free school, new figures published today reveal – with standards rising faster in many academies than in similar council-run schools.

Education Secretary Damian Hinds has hailed the milestone as a decisive moment and urged more schools to consider the freedom and opportunities offered by becoming an academy.

Today’s figures, published by the Department for Education, reflect school leaders’ recognition of the autonomy and freedom to innovate offered by the academies programme, alongside the increased ability to make decisions in the interests of staff and pupils. This has included measures such as altering the length of the school day or adapting the curriculum to help every child access a school that meets their needs, interests and abilities. More than 8,300 schools in the country have become an academy or opened as a free school, with hundreds of schools making the positive choice to convert to become an academy in the last 12 months alone.

The academies programme was introduced by the last Government in 2000 with the aim “to improve pupil performance and break the cycle of low expectation”. By 2010, there were 203 academies – mostly in inner cities.

The 2010 Academies Act gave all schools in England the freedom to choose to become an academy and now over 50% of pupils in the state funded education system are taught in an academy or free school.

Education Secretary Damian Hinds said:

In everything we’ve been doing to improve education these last few years, we have put a strong focus on handing power back to schools, back to school leaders – recognising that they are the ones best placed to make the right decisions for their pupils and their communities.

It is fantastic that 50% of the pupils in state-funded schools in the country are now benefitting from the freedom and autonomy that an academy trust enjoys. But the academies programme has never really been about structures – it has been about trusting head teachers and school leaders to run schools.

Whilst there is a huge amount of diversity in our school system – and there are great schools of all types – I want more schools to choose to become an academy and enjoy the enormous benefits it provides to schools, their staff and pupils.

Alongside “converter” academies – those schools who have chosen to become an academy – “sponsored” academies are typically schools that have been taken out of Local Authority control through government intervention because of educational underperformance. Many of these schools are improving in their inspections from inadequate to good or outstanding after they became sponsored academies. At the end of 2017, only 1 in 10 sponsored academy predecessor schools were judged good or outstanding before they converted, compared to almost 7 in 10 after they became an academy, of those who had been inspected.

Also published today is an analysis of schools that have become sponsored academies in recent years. It matches sponsored academies with similar non-academies based on inspection results and the make-up of their pupils. It shows that sponsored academies that have been open for longer have made substantial gains in performance. The data shows, in many cases, standards have risen more quickly in under-performing schools that have become academies than in similar council-run schools.

Education Secretary Damian Hinds continued:

In the past, schools that failed were allowed to stay under local authority control for far too long. Academies have changed all that – failing schools can now be taken away from local bureaucracies who have not been able to improve them and given to school leaders who can.

We have seen many of these sponsored academies dramatically improve their Ofsted results following conversion, and this new research shows the improvements many schools have made since they became an academy.

As part of our effort to improve school standards across the country, it is important that we are clear that no school will be left to fail their pupils.

The research report on sponsored academies, commissioned by the Department for Education, summarises the latest performance data available, up to and including 2018. The key findings are:

• Thousands of pupils are benefiting from higher standards in their schools after converting to become academies;
• Standards in under-performing schools that have become academies in recent years have, in many cases, risen more quickly than in similar LA schools; and
• Sponsored academies, previously under-performing local authority-run schools, that have been open for the longest have made substantial gains in performance and are now in line with similar non-academies.

Mark Lehain, founder and former Principal of Bedford Free School, said:

I have been fortunate enough to set up both a free school in 2012 and a multi-academy trust in 2017. I’ve also worked with dozens of academies and trusts across the country in a number of roles.

Again and again I have seen how the greater responsibility and additional freedom that comes with academisation enables brilliant leaders and teachers to achieve things with pupils that many thought couldn’t be done. As schools continue to convert, and more children benefit from teachers being in the driving seat, we can look forward to standards rising even higher in the future.

Leora Cruddas, Chief Executive of the Confederation of School Trusts, said:

This is an important moment. School trusts are no longer a policy initiative – a small project in a much larger education system. Half of children and young people in England are educated in the academy sector. We have come of age.

Academies are making a positive difference by turning around schools which have failed children for generations.

Charles Garrett OBE has been appointed Her Majesty’s Ambassador to the Kyrgyz Republic in succession to Mr Robin Ord-Smith MVO who will be transferring to another Diplomatic Service appointment. Mr Garrett will take up his appointment in June 2019.

CURRICULUM VITAE

Full name: Charles Edmund Garrett

Married to: Véronique Frances Edmonde Garrett

Children: Five

2014 to 2018	Skopje, Her Majesty’s Ambassador
2012 to 2013	Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Trust, Commonwealth Affairs Liaison
2010 to 2012	London 2012, Head of International Relations
2009 to 2010	FCO, Strategic Finance Team
2005 to 2009	Taipei, Deputy Director, British Trade & Cultural Office
2003 to 2005	FCO, Head, EU Enlargement Team
2001 to 2003	FCO, Deputy Head, Central European Department
1997 to 2001	Berne, Head of Political & Public Affairs
1995 to 1997	FCO, Team Leader, Central Europe and Balkans, UK Know How Fund
1993 to 1995	FCO, Section Head, Joint Liaison Group Negotiations, Hong Kong Department
1988 to 1993	Hong Kong, Second Secretary UK delegation, Joint Liaison Group
1987 to 1988	FCO, Sovereign Debt Section, Economic Relations Department

Further information

Published 23 January 2019