• His Royal Highness tours UK Atomic Energy Authority’s world-leading fusion experiment in Oxford
• Joint European Torus (JET) is currently the largest and most powerful tokamak in the world; originally opened by Her Majesty The Queen in 1984
• Fusion promises a step-change for energy: near-limitless, low-carbon, long-term, safe and sustainable

HRH The Prince of Wales today saw first-hand how fusion energy could play a key role in addressing climate change through a safe, sustainable and low-carbon future energy supply.

His Royal Highness visited the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s Joint European Torus (JET), the largest and most powerful operating tokamak machine in the world.

Her Majesty The Queen officially opened JET in 1984. Almost 40 years later, experts based at UKAEA’s Culham Science Centre, Oxford, discussed with The Prince of Wales how fusion promises to be an important part of the low-carbon energy mix in the second half of this century, at the same time presenting a significant economic opportunity for Britain.

Professor Ian Chapman, CEO of UKAEA, said: “It was an honour to welcome His Royal Highness to our world-leading fusion energy research and development facility and showcase the ground-breaking JET machine.

“We agreed significant changes are needed to decarbonise the energy supply, and how fusion energy has huge potential to address that challenge. The Prince of Wales was very keen to understand more about how fusion can be a critical piece of the future global energy puzzle and Britain’s leadership position in overcoming the great scientific and engineering challenges set before us.”

Fusion, the process that powers the sun and stars, promises a near-limitless green electricity source for the long term but is one of the biggest scientific and engineering challenges of them all. The fusion reaction does not release carbon into the environment unlike the production of energy by burning coal, oil or gas.

The history of JET:

• 1975: Proposals for the JET machine were completed
• 1977: Culham in Oxfordshire was chosen as the host site for JET
• 1983: JET was turned on and achieved its first plasma before official opening by Her Majesty The Queen
• 1991: Performed the world’s first deuterium-tritium experiment – the fuel mix that will be used in the first commercial fusion power plants
• 1997: A world record 22.5 megajoules of fusion energy and 16 megawatts of fusion power achieved in the first dedicated deuterium-tritium run of experiments, proving large amounts of power can be produced from fusion
• 2021: Completes a second full-power run of experiments using deuterium and tritium
• 2022: 100,000th pulse completed, with new scientific results to be released in February

JET is currently the only tokamak – a machine which confines a plasma using magnetic fields – in the world running experiments using deuterium and tritium, isotopes of hydrogen. It has been key to the development of its successor ITER, the larger and more advanced version of JET and based in France, and one of the biggest collaborative science projects in history, involving 35 nations.

ITER, which is expected to come into operation in the mid-2020s, plans to operate under similar to those conditions used by JET and will continue working towards demonstrating the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion energy.

JET’s experiments are run by researchers from the EUROfusion consortium – 4,800 experts, students and staff from across Europe, co-funded by the European Commission.

• Government proposes new cap to ensure legal costs for lower value clinical negligence cases are proportionate and fair
• Patients will be prioritised with a new streamlined process to secure faster resolutions
• Proposals could save the NHS half a billion pounds over the next ten years

The government is launching a consultation to protect NHS funding by tackling increasing and disproportionate legal fees for lower value clinical negligence claims.

The proposals would bring legal costs more in line with the amount of compensation being awarded for lower value claims. These are typically worth between £1,001 and £25,000.

The plans would only affect the legal costs that people making claims and their lawyers can recover following a successful claim, not the amount of compensation that patients would receive.

In recent years the overall cost of clinical negligence claims has risen significantly, and the National Audit Office (NAO) has identified the legal fees of people making claims as a significant factor.

These claimant legal costs are currently more than four times higher on average than defendant legal costs for lower value claims.

One reason for this is there is currently no limit on the legal costs that can be claimed by lawyers. It means these costs are, on average double the compensation received by patients for lower value claims. In one case, lawyers claimed £72,000 in legal costs for a case in which the patient was awarded £3,000.

This takes vital funding from the NHS frontline as it continues to tackle the backlogs that have built up during the pandemic. It is estimated these proposals could save nearly half a billion pounds over the next ten years.

Although overall clinical negligence costs have risen sharply, the National Audit Office (NAO) has recognised that this does not appear to be due to any decline in patient safety, which has been and remains a top priority for both Government and NHS.

Minister for Patient Safety Maria Caulfield said:

I’m committed to making the NHS the safest healthcare system in the world. When harm does occur, it’s essential the NHS learns from what went wrong, and people who have been negligently harmed are entitled to claim compensation.

Unfortunately, we are seeing some law firms profiting at the NHS’ expense through legal costs that far outweigh the actual compensation awarded to patients. This diverts resources from the NHS frontline as staff work hard to tackle the COVID-19 backlogs.

Our proposals will cap legal costs for lower value claims to ensure they are fair and proportionate, and ensure patients’ claims are resolved as swiftly as possible without reducing the compensation they deserve.

The government is also consulting on a new streamlined process to ensure claims are processed more quickly, ensuring faster resolution and reducing the need to go to court. This includes assigning claims to two tracks according to their complexity and including two resolution stages within the process to encourage agreement and minimise delay, cost and distress, including a stocktake meeting between parties and a neutral evaluation by a barrister.

The proposals follow Sir Rupert Jackson’s (then Lord Justice Jackson’s) 2017 recommendation that the Civil Justice Council (CJC) develop a bespoke, streamlined system of fixed recoverable costs. Their report was published in October 2019.

Today’s consultation is closely aligned to the CJC’s recommendations and takes into account the responses to DHSC’s previous 2017 consultation.

The overall cost of clinical negligence in England rose from £582 million in 2006/7 to £2.2 billion in 2020/21, representing a significant burden on the NHS. For all claims, legal costs have increased more than fourfold to £433 million since 2006/7.

The government has committed to address these unsustainable costs and is working closely with the NHS on proposals.

Alongside this effort, the government and NHS continue to undertake world-leading work to improve patient safety, for example:

• The first National Patient Safety Strategy for the NHS was published in July 2019 and updated in February 2021, to address the learning from the COVID-19 pandemic, and to act to reduce patient safety inequalities.
• The government is investing £9.4 million to pilot interventions aimed at reducing brain injuries during birth, which account for around half the costs of clinical negligence, although these claims would not be impacted by the proposals being announced today.
• The NHS is investing an additional £95 million in maternity services to recruit 1,200 midwives and 100 consultant obstetricians. The fund will support training, and development programmes, improve culture and leadership, and strengthen assurance and monitoring on maternity safety issues so that we identify and learn from problems earlier.

I always wanted to be scientist. I was aware of great mathematicians such as Alan Turing and of Margaret Hamilton, who did all the coding for the Apollo space program – it was ground-breaking and inspiring. Dr Hamiliton was a woman and she was leading the way in her own right. I remember seeing that unusual picture of her among all these men. Just like the conference picture of Marie Curie among the likes of Einstein and Heisenberg.

Working patents

I have three patents – which is really unusual for a mathematician! One is for work on the pre-treatment of sepsis – which is for the artificial neural network. It’s a complex signature; the human body and its immune system is complicated. It’s not as simple to predict as just one marker will go up and one will down. We needed to map the markers. I work on a number of projects across the lab. My meta-analysis on viral vs bacterial discrimination led to decisions on when it’s a good idea to give out antibiotics or not. We need that for the war-fighter for a more targeted treatment. I’m particularly proud of that as it was a consortium of industry, academia and Dstl. No blood work, it’s a purely maths project.

I am a technical lead in a project called Vulnerabilities, which looks to harden and defend autonomous military systems for deployment. The range of work a statistician and mathematician can do within an S&T organisation is wide and varied. Every piece of work having impact and contributing to UK Defence, it’s what keeps me at Dstl. It’s what motivates me.

Speaking from a maths conference in San Diego, Phillippa added:

I really enjoy my position as a senior mathematician. The benefit of being a senior mathematician is that you help provide and identify opportunities for others and inspire them. I’ve had to fight for some of my opportunities. Putting yourself forward – it’s kind of a philosophy of ‘don’t ask, don’t get’. I still think: What if I’ve been too pushy? As women, it’s ingrained from a young age. We have a lot of anxiety about being at the front of the stage. As a girl in this world, you have to be confident in yourself and do not let anxiety cripple you; easier said than done.

I’m the lead for the gender equality network so I care very much about promoting equality for men and women in science and in our organisation in general. As a female mathematician, I’m still often the only girl in the room. I didn’t always notice it when I was I was younger. Often I am pushed into the background but I think that’s because maths is seen as something that everyone should be able to do, rather than a discipline in its own right. I’m now in the Cyber Defence Group – the group are an amazing support and I’m comfortable in that environment. In an organisation like Dstl, everyone brings something to the party, everyone has something to offer.

Maths as a career

First and foremost, remember that maths takes you everywhere. There isn’t an area of maths and society that maths doesn’t touch. It’s a key to many doors. From GCSE, get your A-level maths under your belt. There are lots of routes into it. Find a degree that works for you – whether that’s applied maths or pure maths. I would always recommend people doing a masters, as it gives you an element of freedom and research in maths.

Mathematicians are very much in demand in data, computer science, the financial sector, the world is open to you. I’ve been to Florida to see the F-35 jets, I’ve been to the Pentagon. The things I’ve seen because I chose a career in statistics are amazing and I feel very privileged and very lucky.

Recognition for Phillippa

Since this article was first published, Phillippa has been recognised with an OBE in the 2021 New Year Honours. She also won Woman of the Year at the 2019 Women in Defence awards.