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techUK’s campaign week ‘The 5G Future’ – highlighting the importance of the upcoming 5G mobile network, technologies & applications.

Throughout last week techUK published news, views & insights from the technology sector on the deployment of 5G and the advantages for individuals, businesses and vertical markets in the UK.

Keep up to date with all of this material by viewing all of the Blog posts including:

• How can businesses benefit from embracing the 5G era?
• Could mmWave and edge drive the next era of IoT Connectivity?
• 5G: What should businesses expect from the UK rollout?
• How can businesses benefit from embracing the 5G era?
• 5G for you and me; how will 5G change our day to day?
• How the 5G testbed and trials programme is stimulating innovation
• How vertical markets will be disrupted by 5G

Plans to ensure that millions of household items that are connected to the internet are better protected from cyber attacks have been launched by Digital Minister Margot James.

Options that the Government will be consulting on include a mandatory new labelling scheme.  The label would tell consumers how secure their products such as ‘smart’ TVs, toys and appliances are.  The move means that retailers will only be able to sell products with an Internet of Things (IoT) security label.  The consultation focuses on mandating the top 3 security requirements that are set out in the current ‘Secure by Design’ code of practice. 

Following the consultation, the security label will initially be launched as a voluntary scheme to help consumers identify products that have basic security features and those that don’t.  Alternative options to the label that Government are also consulting on would be to mandate retailers to not sell any products that do not adhere to the top three security requirements of the Code.

A system for assessing whether a patient’s condition is deteriorating has been rolled out across the North West Coast – thanks to the Innovation Agency.

NEWS2 is the latest version of the National Early Warning Score (NEWS), a points system that helps improve the detection of clinical deterioration.  NEWS, which was first produced in 2012 and then updated by the Royal College of Physicians in 2017, is an approach to standardising the assessment of, & response to, acute illness. It consists of a scoring system based on a number of simple criteria which helps improve the detection of clinical deterioration in patients.

Endorsed by NHS England and NHS Improvement for use in acute & ambulance settings, the implementation of NEWS2 is being facilitated across England through the 15 Patient Safety Collaboratives (PSCs), which are managed & delivered by the AHSNs. Locally, all acute hospitals and the ambulance trust within the North West Coast region have adopted or are in the process of adopting NEWS2. 

The UK can end its contribution to global warming within 30 years by setting an ambitious new target to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) said last week.

Ten years after the Climate Change Act became law, now is the right moment to set a more ambitious goal. Achieving a ‘net-zero’ target by the middle of the century is in line with the UK’s commitment under the Paris Agreement; the pact which the UK and the rest of the world signed in 2015 to curb dramatically the polluting gases that cause climate change.

Scotland has greater potential to remove pollution from its economy than the UK overall, and can credibly adopt a more ambitious target of reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) by 2045.  Wales has slightly lower opportunities than the UK as a whole, and should adopt a target for a 95% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, compared to 1990 levels.

The report from the HCLG Select Committee says Children’s Services need an extra £3.1bn in funding to survive, and that’s just the start.

Coming on the back of highly critical reports from the Public Accounts Committee and the National Audit Office, the report paints a picture of malign neglect of children’s services on the part of Central Government.  The result is a perfect storm of increased expectations, rising demand & cost pressures which local authorities cannot control.

We are pleased to see much of our evidence to the committee reflected in the final report.  We’re particularly pleased to see the Housing, Communities and Local Government Select Committee recognise that additional funding alone is not sufficient, and that “increased funding must go hand-in-hand with systemic change if local authority children’s services are to be sustainable in the long-term”.  

Recently there has been some comment in the media about how up to 30% of children in the UK are ‘starving’ because their families are ‘living in poverty’ (Emma Thompson tackles Government on children's food poverty today)

While many children may well be ‘going hungry’, one has to wonder if this is just as a result of low family income or also due to the inability of many modern-day parents to prepare & cook wholesome food using raw materials, which are not sourced from ‘branded’ items (for example porridge & raisins rather than a ‘sugar’  brand cereal for breakfast).

BBC One - Eat Well for Less? 

What about teaching better life skills (especially home cooking) as well?

One ‘family-sized’ Indian/Chinese take-away or a delivered Pizza could ‘pay for’ several home-cooked family meals (especially those low in meat – as those proposed in the recent CCC report).  Although one does appreciate the difficulties faced by people living in emergency accommodation to prepare home-cooked meals due to lack of space & facilities (such as a fridge).

The government has not helped the problem of families budgeting for all their weekly/monthly expenditures with its ‘botched’ implementation of Universal Credit, where the changeover of benefit delivery has seen around a 5-week ‘gap’ in benefit payments, which many cannot cope with.

Universal Credit contributing to child poverty

IFS:   Universal credit to hit 1.9m by over £1,000 per year – though for many these losses are temporary

Citizens Advice launches new service for people applying for Universal Credit

Amber Rudd: “Behind our supportive staff is a compassionate system”

JRF:  Universal Credit can loosen the grip of poverty, but further reform is needed

DWP to look at frequency of Universal Credit payments

However, one also has to factor in the dichotomy of the current epidemic of obesity in children UK-wide and the appearance of the first cases of diabetes 2 in children.

In gardening terms, this is a ‘hardy perennial’ issue

We should also bear in mind that poverty is relative depending where you happen to be born in this world and that here in the UK we don’t really know the meaning of true poverty at its most extreme.

ESRC:  How climate change led to Cambodia's 'blood bricks'

Perhaps the solution for lack of government funding for healthcare & Local Authority spending would be (as has been suggested before) to divert some of the £bns we spend on ‘dubious’ foreign aid projects to resolving UK funding issues (like Children’s Services and Home Economics lessons in school & free evening classes for adults).  

From an archived article: “People / politicians / the Media are increasingly calling for a bi-party approach to health & social care policy and a re-examination of the 0.7% of GDP set aside for Foreign Aid (FA), especially money given to third parties, where we have no control over how it is spent.  In March 2015 (as we have highlighted before),  MPs found that £6.3bn of Britain's aid budget had been handed to major agencies to help hit the target of spending 0.7% of nation's income on foreign aid (including the EU, which then ‘claimed it as their own ‘aid’ one presumes).” 

Edit.  Commentary:  Which would you choose; ‘Your Granny’ on a hospital trolley in A&E / unable to get social care, or a crying unaccompanied refugee child already in a ‘civilised’ EU country?

Edit. Comment: Helping refugees is not the only important issue to consider when dividing the ‘economic cake