Five Youth Performance Partnerships will be created in England to give young people greater access to the performing arts, Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Jeremy Wright has announced.

The scheme will bring arts organisations and schools together to teach practical performance skills both on and off stage, including drama, dance, art, creative writing, lighting, sound and set design.

Primary and secondary schools will also be linked up with playwrights to give children the opportunity to perform new works by up and coming writers.

The Youth Performance Partnerships will be delivered by Arts Council England over three academic years and will reach 10,000 young people.

The Arts Council will select one partnership in the North, the Midlands, South West, South East and London, and prioritise places where not enough young people have the chance to take part in performance.

The Partnerships build on the success of Music Education Hubs which helps over 600,000 children a year access activities like playing an instrument, singing in a choir or joining a band.

The Government will set up a pilot scheme to reduce food waste, Environment Secretary Michael Gove has announced today.

The scheme will be supported by £15 million of additional funding which has been allocated to tackle food waste.

Currently around 43,000 tonnes of surplus food is redistributed from retailers and food manufacturers every year. It is estimated a further 100,000 tonnes of food – equating to 250 million meals a year – is edible and readily available but goes uneaten. Instead, this food is currently sent away for generating energy from waste, anaerobic digestion, or animal feed.

The pilot scheme will be developed over the coming months in collaboration with businesses and charities. The scheme will launch in 2019/20.

Environment Secretary Michael Gove said:

Nobody wants to see good food go to waste. It harms our environment, it’s bad for business – and it’s morally indefensible.

Every year, around 100,000 tonnes of readily available and perfectly edible food is never eaten. This has got to change.

In the coming months we will work closely with business, charities and volunteers to deliver a new scheme to tackle this problem.

The scheme will specifically address surplus food from retail and manufacturing. This is just one part of the problem – food waste in the UK totals 10.2 million tonnes per year, of which 1.8 million tonnes comes from food manufacture, 1 million from the hospitality sector, and 260,000 from retail, with the remainder from households. Further action to cut food waste from all sources is being considered as part of Defra’s Resources and Waste Strategy, which will be published later this year.

Defra is commissioning work to improve the evidence base around food waste, including understanding why more surplus food is not being redistributed. This work will inform the design of the scheme, ensuring it drives down food waste in the most effective possible way.

Dr David Moon, Head of Business Collaboration at WRAP said:

Today’s announcement is a great boost for the many support networks around the country working hard to ensure good food feeds people, and is not wasted.

Between 2015 and 2017 surplus food redistributed from retailers, manufacturers and hospitality and food services businesses increased by 50%, with nearly £130 million worth of food saved from waste.

And there is the potential to increase this significantly, and to expand the range and type of foods with more fresh produce. Not only will this benefit people, it will also help reduce the huge environmental impact of food waste.

The new scheme follows the £500,000 Food Waste Reduction Fund announced in December last year to support the substantial reduction of food waste throughout England.

In July this year it was announced that funds have been awarded to eight charities across the country. The Food Waste Reduction Fund grants will help provide the essential resources needed to expand their important work, and will further inform development of the new scheme.

Further information:

• In 2017, 205,000 tonnes of surplus food in the retail and food manufacturing sectors was wasted. Some of the surplus is difficult to minimise, costly in that it would need to be reworked or repackaged, and some surplus would not be edible. It is estimated by WRAP that 100,000 tonnes of this is both accessible and edible with the remaining being more difficult to redistribute.

• The pilot will run in 2019/20, drawing on £15 million additional funding the Treasury have allocated to Defra to tackle food waste. Any future funding would be subject to the Spending Review.

This is the third annual Charity Fraud Awareness Week aiming to help you increase resilience against fraud.

More than 40 charities, regulators, professional bodies and other stakeholders are joining forces to help combat fraud targeted against charities.

The main aims of the week are to:

• raise awareness of the key risks affecting the sector
• promote and share good counter-fraud practices
• promote honesty and openness about fraud

Fraud awareness week themes

Each day of national charity fraud week the campaign will focus in on particular topics.

How to get involved

We are encouraging the charity sector to get involved in Fraud Awareness Week, you can:

• download a UK supporters pack from the Fraud Advisory Panel website
• download an international edition of the supporters pack from the Fraud Advisory Panel website
• develop your own counter fraud activities aimed at staff and volunteers, members and beneficiaries, donors and supporters, for example staff awareness training
• join the conversation on Twitter by promoting your own counter fraud messages or retweet ours using the hashtag #CharityFraudOut

Our guidance will also help you to protect your charity from fraud.

Today (1 October 2018) the government and Cornwall Council have announced that direct flights between Newquay Airport and London Gatwick have been secured for a further 4 years, backed by funding from both organisations.

The service will see daily flights between the 2 airports, with 3 return flights on weekdays and 2 per day at weekends. Operated by FlyBe, the service will commence from October 2018.

This follows success of the previous route offered by Flybe, which saw demand almost double over 3 years. Gatwick flights now account for 40% of all passengers using Newquay Airport.

And the funding has further increased confidence in the airport, with other airlines operating new routes from Dusseldorf, Frankfurt and Stuttgart.

Public Service Obligation routes are used to subsidise vital air connections and economic and social development in peripheral regions, where a clear business case is put forward.

The Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA) are scoping the potential for an innovation competition addressing injury prevention in the British Army by means of wearable technology. We would like to engage the market to explore market interest and to aid the scope and design of a potential future competition in advance of launch. This will provide us with an understanding of what already exists for injury prevention that can be adapted for military use as well as truly novel solutions.

Background

A study in December 2017 showed that 19.8% of personnel were medically downgraded. Of the physical injuries represented in this figure the most common were musculoskeletal injury (MSKI), environmental injury (from heat and cold) and noise induced hearing loss (NIHL). As with any organisation requiring a physical presence there is an irreducible minimum. The best sports teams work with a 7 to 12% margin for all illnesses and this accords with Commander Field Army’s target of 90% deployability. In addition to the human cost behind these figures the rehabilitation of manpower capability accounts for over £100 million per annum.

The British Army is seeking rapid innovations to improve the deployability and overall health of service personnel through the use of data science and technology. The aspiration is to employ practical sensors (wearable technology) that will provide indicators and warnings prior to injury; to allow for early intervention and prevention of injuries.

The three focus areas for this market exploration are:

1. MSKI prevention: MSKI is recognised as the leading cause of medical discharge in the British Army. The study showed that 61% of the Army’s non deployable personnel were as a result of MSKI, of which the average soldier took 9.5 months to fully recover
2. environmental injury prevention: heat and non-freezing cold injuries (NFCI) accounted for 2.5% of downgraded service personnel
3. NIHL prevention: 5% of service personnel downgraded were due to NIHL, an increase on the previous year

All three areas are significantly impacting the operational effectiveness of the British Army notwithstanding the personal impact on our personnel.

What we want

We are interested in potential solutions that utilise science and technology as a means to prevent, not treat, injury in service personnel. We are looking for novel methods to provide early warning or prevention methods for physical injury, specifically using practical wearable technology.

We are also interested in ideas involving novel approaches to the data management and subsequent identification of issues using existing technology.

In the long term any technology must be scalable across the whole force, and should be compatible with the realities of military usage, such as robustness, and cyber security.

We are interested in potential solutions that aim to address any or all of the areas at any level of maturity, particularly those that are at a higher technology level which could be trialled within 6 months. Potential solutions should be presented by teams with the experience and knowledge necessary to establish sound scientific evidence for any potential technology.

By completing the Capability Submission Form neither the Government nor yourselves are committing to anything, but your submissions will be used to help focus the direction of the work and the requirements for a possible themed call in this area in the future.

What we do not want

We are not interested in literature reviews, paper-based studies, preventative medicine, non-technical solutions or marginal improvements to existing capabilities.

We are not interested in static scanning technologies or invasive technologies.

We are not interested in any novel theories for biomarkers or proxies for emerging issues which do not have a sound established scientific basis in the literature.

How to submit a Capability Submission Form

Complete the attached short form
Capability Submission Form for Wearable Technology
(ODT, 867KB)

, noting the word limits, and then email it to accelerator@dstl.gov.uk by midday 19 October 2018.

Please only provide details of one product or capability per form. If you have a number of potential solutions then please submit multiple forms.

If you have any questions then please email accelerator@dstl.gov.uk with Wearable Technology in the subject line.

How we use your information

Information you provide to us in a capability submission form, that is not already available to us from other sources, will be handled in-confidence. By submitting a capability submission form you are giving us permission to keep and use the information for our internal purposes, and to provide the information onwards, in-confidence, within UK Government. DASA will not use or disclose the information for any other purpose, without first requesting permission to do so.