WIREDGOV

For nearly two decades we have helped local government create and maintain the Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN) and Unique Street Reference. Number (USRN).

GeoPlace ensure that they are nationally unique, persistent & otherwise well-behaved.  Each local authority in England, Scotland & Wales allocates a 12-digit number (known as the UPRN) to each new “addressable object” at the earliest possible stage of its lifecycle.

This has never been particularly headline-grabbing work and doesn’t help you make friends at parties, but it has been incredibly effective at improving services and decision making in Great Britain. The UPRN now underpins many important aspects of government including the real-time transfer of incidents between emergency services, understanding citizens and delivering better services.  It’s a helpful way to link people to places.  The trend is spreading across the private sector too.

A new study by Public Health England, the University of Oxford and others reveals we can better predict a patient’s response to TB treatments.

Public Health England (PHE) scientists have been part of a UK-wide collaboration which found that our understanding of tuberculosis (TB) genetic code is now detailed enough to predict a person’s response to TB treatments.  With rapid DNA sequencing technologies available, it will be possible to give the correct drugs to more patients, improving cure rates and helping to stop the spread of drug-resistant strains.

If you’re setting up or running a flat management company, our interactive learning tool can guide you through everything you need to know.

Companies House has launched the first of their online interactive learning tools: flat management companies.

Flat management companies are commonly set up to own the freehold of a property such as a block of flats, and to manage the communal parts of the building.  The directors & shareholders of the company are usually the residents of the property.

The UK has launched a £2m competition alongside the US in a joint-mission to safely eliminate chemical & biological devices on the battlefield.

The Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA), part of the Defence Science & Technology Laboratory and UK MoD, has launched the ‘Don’t Blow It!’ competition, the first joint UK-US industry competition run by DASA and funded by the MOD and US Department of Defense.

Competitors have been asked to identify innovative concepts or adapt current technologies to access, disable and destroy chemical & biological devices.  This includes chemical & biological munitions, improvised explosive devices containing lethal agents or containers of bulk quantities of chemical or biological agents discovered on the battlefield or in other austere and resource-limited environments.

Although it is over 100 years since the first large-scale use of chemical weapons, the threat from both chemical and biological weapons persists.  This has been demonstrated by the recent rise in the use of such deadly weapons on the battlefield and in targeted attacks.

If one is following the Brexit negotiations in the main media, one would be inclined to think that if we ‘solve the RoI / NI border conundrum’ the Brexit negotiations would then rapidly come to a successful conclusion.

However, there is one other area of contention that the EU is likely to use at the last moment of the negotiation process to ‘squeeze out its last cherry-picking of UK assets’– the Spain / Gibraltar border issue.  The EU’s position is that Spain has a veto on any application of a Brexit Agreement to Gibraltar.

A previous article from Briefings for Brexit (BfB:  Gibraltar & the EU – lessons from an unprincipled approach ) sums up the situation in a comprehensive manner and illustrates how these negotiations provide the best (and probably last for many years) opportunity for Spain to regain at least joint ‘control’ of Gibraltar, with regard to its taxation system, airport and territorial waters, leaving it as the equivalent of a sort of UK County Council..

It could also be a useful bargaining chip with regards to loss of fishing rights, although ‘Spain gets around the problem by having a Spanish-owned but British-flagged fleet, a legacy of the years before Spain joined the EU, when it invested in Britain to gain access to the bloc’s fishing quotas, the Spanish Confederation of Fisheries (Cepesca) said’. (Independent:  UK fishermen expect a post-Brexit bonanza - but there's a catch ).

That situation could potentially be transformed if Defra changes the way UK fishing quotas are assigned when they finally get control of UK waters and the fishing rights, especially if the EU denies UK fisherman access to EU markets.  However, Spain may be expecting that the ‘Gibraltar card’ could be a useful aid in protecting those current ‘investments/rights’.