Capitalising on the Industrial Strategy and Wales’ key priorities for Budget 2018 will top the agenda at a meeting of Welsh business representatives and the UK Government in Wales in Cardiff today (10 May).

Secretary of State for Wales Alun Cairns will welcome members of his Economic Advisory Board to Caspian Point where they will explore how the positive impact of the Industrial Strategy can be maximised in Wales. Discussions will focus particularly on exploring Sector Deals, cross-border growth opportunities, removing barriers to innovation and developing new trade and investment deals to increase exports.

Welsh Secretary Alun Cairns said:

The Industrial Strategy is a vital part of the UK Government’s plan to drive growth across the whole of the United Kingdom and create more high-skilled, high paid jobs and opportunities.

New Sector Deals, growth corridors and investment in research and development are set to support the industries of the future where the UK – and Wales in particular – has the potential to lead the world. I’m keen to hear how our key businesses leaders feel Wales can play to its strengths and capitalise on the benefits to be had from embedding the Strategy firmly into our growth plans.

The Economic Advisory Board provides the UK Government with a platform to hear first-hand how businesses in Wales are faring on the ground, to hear their views on how UK Government policy is benefiting them, and what more can be done to support their ambitions for growth.

Today’s meeting will also provide the opportunity to share ideas on the measures the Welsh business community would like to see included in the Budget when it is announced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Autumn.

The Secretary of State will share the proposals with the Treasury for consideration in the run up to the fiscal event later this year.

Alun Cairns added:

Since 2010, the UK Government has been implementing robust measures to help rebuild the Welsh economy.

From the commitment to abolish the Severn Crossing tolls to the City and Growth Deals that span the country, these are firm statements of our intent to boost Wales’ prosperity.

But there is still more work to be done. As we look ahead to the Chancellor’s Budget, it is important for me to have the opportunity to hear the type of policy proposals business representatives in Wales would like the UK Government to consider to further stimulate our economy.

I will be particularly interested to hear their views on the main barriers to growth and what they feel key infrastructure priorities should be. I will be sharing the outcome of these discussions with the Chancellor of the Exchequer to ensure the voice of the Welsh business community is heard loud and clear in Westminster.

This event will enable the winning suppliers from the competition to showcase their research proposals to end users, government and other organisations. The outcome of this event is to enable future collaboration between organisations to enable these innovative ideas to be developed and integrated into working products. We are interested to understand if you are a company working in this area or whether you would like to hear about exciting new developments in this field.

Finding explosives in electrical items programme

In March 2017, the UK introduced a ban on large electronic devices in the cabin of UK-bound aircraft from certain airports in the Middle East and North Africa. Restrictions like these are of great concern to the aviation industry, and equally to passengers. Stopping passengers from travelling with electrical items can have a huge impact on personal and business activity.

Background to the competition

The competition is seeking to help the UK Government, Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and the aviation industry to improve aviation security processes, by staying ahead of evolving threats whilst reducing delays at checkpoint screening. The suppliers which have now been funded as part of the competition process, could provide an alternative to imposing bans on electrical items or implementing additional laborious screening measures.

To register

The event is taking place on Thursday 7 June 2018 in London. If you would like to register your expression of interest to attend, please reply to accelerator@dstl.gov.uk by Thursday 24 May 2018 at 1pm, with the subject title of ‘FASS Collaboration day 7 June 2018’ stating the following information:

• name of attendee
• organisation
• why you would like to attend

Successful applicants will then be sent a link to register for attendance. Please note that if the event is oversubscribed, we will have to limit the number attending from a single organisation. Joining instructions for the event, including the venue details and agenda will be distributed on Thursday 31 May 2018.

Dean Jacobs, 29 of Birmingham, was the sole director of L & H Construction Limited, a specialist recruitment company helping people in the mechanical and electrical industries find new work.

But after trading for a little over two and a half years, the business ran into difficulties and L & H Construction entered into administration on 4 January 2017 after HMRC presented a winding up petition for an outstanding tax bill. Upon administration, L & H Construction owed creditors close to £800,000.

Insolvency practitioners were brought in to deal with the administration but Dean Jacobs failed to cooperate with their investigations.

Administrators were then made aware that L & H Construction was awarded an insurance settlement and when asked where the money had gone, Dean Jacobs could not provide any explanation of what he did with the funds.

Further investigations by the Insolvency Service found that despite being fully aware that L & H Construction had stopped trading and owed money to creditors, Dean Jacobs diverted £60,000 from an insurance settlement straight into his personal bank account.

As a result, on 16 April 2018 the Secretary of State accepted a disqualification undertaking from Dean Jacobs. The ban became effective from 7 May 2018 and he is now banned from directly or indirectly becoming involved, without the permission of the court, in the promotion, formation or management of a company for 10 years.

Susan MacLeod, Chief Investigator of Insolvent Investigations, Midlands & West at the Insolvency Service, said:

Dean Jacobs put his own interests ahead of the company’s creditors and the timing of the funds he took from the insurance settlement showed a cynical disregard to those creditors.

Directors who put their own personal financial interest above those of creditors damage business confidence. We will take action against directors who do not take their duties seriously and abuse their position and they will therefore lose the privilege of limited liability trading.

Dean Jacobs date of birth is February 1989 and he is known to have resided in Birmingham.

L & H Construction Limited (CRO No.09278805) was incorporated on 24 October 2014 and traded from Birmingham as a provider of specialist recruitment in the mechanical and electrical industry.

Dean Jacobs was the sole registered director from 25 October 2015 until the company went into administration on 4 January 2017. The estimated deficiency as regards creditors and shareholders was £799,361.

On 16 April 2018 the Secretary of State accepted a Disqualification Undertaking from Dean Jacobs, effective from 07 May 2018, for a period of 10 years. The matters of unfitness that were accepted were that:

On/after 06 December 2016, Dean Jacobs caused an insurance settlement due to L & H Construction Limited in the sum of £60,000 to be paid into his own personal bank account at a time when he knew L&H was insolvent and as a result creditors suffered a loss.

Disqualification

A disqualification order has the effect that without specific permission of a court, a person with a disqualification cannot:

• act as a director of a company
• take part, directly or indirectly, in the promotion, formation or management of a company or limited liability partnership
• be a receiver of a company’s property

Disqualification undertakings are the administrative equivalent of a disqualification order but do not involve court proceedings.

Persons subject to a disqualification order are bound by a range of other restrictions.

The Insolvency Service (England and Wales)

The Insolvency Service, an executive agency sponsored by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), administers the insolvency regime, and aims to deliver and promote a range of investigation and enforcement activities both civil and criminal in nature, to support fair and open markets. We do this by effectively enforcing the statutory company and insolvency regimes, maintaining public confidence in those regimes and reducing the harm caused to victims of fraudulent activity and to the business community, including dealing with the disqualification of directors in corporate failures.

BEIS’ mission is to build a dynamic and competitive UK economy that works for all, in particular by creating the conditions for business success and promoting an open global economy. The Criminal Investigations and Prosecutions team contributes to this aim by taking action to deter fraud and to regulate the market. They investigate and prosecute a range of offences, primarily relating to personal or company insolvencies.

The agency also authorises and regulates the insolvency profession, assesses and pays statutory entitlement to redundancy payments when an employer cannot or will not pay employees, provides banking and investment services for bankruptcy and liquidation estate funds and advises ministers and other government departments on insolvency law and practice.

Further information about the work of the Insolvency Service, and how to complain about financial misconduct, is available.

Media enquiries for this press release – 020 7596 6187 or 020 7637 6498

You can also follow the Insolvency Service on:

Representatives from the Japan Atomic Energy Authority (JAEA) visited Dounreay and Sellafield to learn more about the nuclear decommissioning and hazard reduction programmes, and to find out if the UK’s nuclear innovation could be used at sites in Japan.

Dounreay – in Caithness, Scotland – is the former centre of fast reactor research and development, and is one of the UK’s most complex nuclear decommissioning projects.

Sellafield, which has been at the forefront of the UK’s nuclear industry for several decades, is now making significant progress in cleaning up the legacy from the earliest days of nuclear.

Dr Adrian Simper, the NDA’s Strategy and Technology Director, said:

These visits are an important part of the work being done by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), its subsidiary International Nuclear Services, and the Department for International Trade to highlight the UK’s nuclear decommissioning expertise to overseas customers.

The work being done on the NDA sites is pioneering the way nuclear facilities are decommissioned all over the world and showcases the unique expertise that is on offer within the UK’s nuclear supply chain.

Cockermouth-based Createc has recently won a Queen’s Award for Enterprise for its work on nuclear decommissioning projects in Japan and the United States. Createc produced radiation mapping equipment, developed for use at Sellafield, which has gone on to be used in the damaged Fukushima reactor.

Thank you Madame President,

And thank you for this opportunity for a candid and constructive discussion with our Force Commanders who I thank for their briefings so far and I put on notice that I am going to ask lots of questions to and hope to hear from later. Thank you also to Under-Secretary-General Lacroix for everything you have had to say and for your leadership on these issues. I do think it is very important for our Force Commanders that you are able to be here with the Security Council and able to speak truth to us and to be a clear as you need to be with all of us here, so please be candid.

Before I go into some of those questions though, I would like to take colleagues back; some of us were on the Security Council visit to Mali last November where we had the great honour of participating in the dedication of a memorial to all who had lost their lives serving in MINUSMA. And I think it’s important that we take the time and the moment to pay tribute to all those peacekeepers that have given their lives in service of the United Nations, and to all the brave women and men that serve now in support of the UN’s peace operations. I would like to offer the United Kingdom’s thanks for their service and for the service and leadership of our Force Commanders here today.

Peacekeeping is one of this organisation’s greatest achievements. It is an integral part of what our peoples around the world think of when they think of the United Nations and we celebrate this year, the 70th anniversary of United Nations peacekeeping. And as we strive for reform in the wider UN system, so we must work to make UN peacekeeping more effective and efficient, through better mission planning, through more pledges of troops and capabilities, and stronger mission performance.

We therefore welcome both the report on improving the safety and security of peacekeepers by General dos Santos Cruz and the UN’s Action Plan and the Secretary-General’s Action for Peacekeeping initiative that has flown from that. We see three key priorities:

Firstly, that this Council should take a longer-term view of conflicts and set more strategic and sequenced mandates.

Secondly, that peacekeeping should be better coordinated with other UN activities such as peacebuilding and development.

And thirdly, improved peacekeeping performance, including accountability where performance is not at the right standard.

My first question to our Commanders is: how is the Action plan being implemented in your missions? General Deconinck mentioned the importance of intelligence in peacekeeping, in situational awareness, sending our peacekeepers out with knowledge of what is going on around them. What improvements have been made in the use of peacekeeping intelligence and how can we in New York further support those efforts?

And then in the context of efforts to further improve the performance of peacekeepers, I know the Secretariat has been tasked to develop an integrated performance policy framework. My question would be whether the Force Commanders have a view on what the performance framework should contain? How do we incentivise better performance in missions?

Specific questions on some of the missions: On UNAMID, thank you very much for what you had to say about the reconfiguration work. I would just ask what you think, General, the next steps should be in the mission’s reconfiguration. In particular, whether any challenges are being faced alongside the mandate to protect civilians.

On MINUSMA, again I thought that that was a very helpful intervention. A question I would have is: we know of course MINUSMA is working in the same space as the G5 Sahel Joint Taskforce, I’d just like to know how well the military actors are joining up to ensure they contribute in their defined ways to the common objective, and how the link with development humanitarian is going? Is there a coordinated plan that brings together the different military actors and the different development actors behind them to make the most of all of the tools we have at our disposal in Mali?

And then finally to the General commanding UNMISS, I want to say how we talked about this yesterday and it should be in the Council, how impressed we have been by some of the swift and decisive action taken recently in response to cases of sexual exploitation and abuse. And I just wonder – this is obviously a big problem still in different missions – whether you could give some examples of the best practice you’ve used in South Sudan that might help other missions to learn and to be able to respond effectively if it happens to them.

Let me finish there in the spirit of interactiveness and reiterate my sincere gratitude to all of those serving in blue for the good of all of us.

Thank you.