• Aviation Skills Retention Platform launched with an initial 2,185 vacancies
• comes as a 6-month renewal of the successful Airport and Ground Operations Support Scheme is announced
• both initiatives are designed to safeguard the sector as wider restrictions begin to lift

The aviation sector is set to benefit from further government support with the creation of an all-new Aviation Skills Retention Platform (ASRP) to boost employment and upskill candidates in the industry.

The platform is an ‘online skills and recruitment centre’ specially tailored to find jobs for candidates who currently may be unable to work as a result of the pandemic, or similar roles that match their existing skillset.

The government has partnered with several leading employers, including the Civil Aviation Association, BAE Systems and Rolls Royce to offer an initial 2,185 vacancies, with more added every day.

The scheme will preserve essential expertise while addressing the wider skills shortage in the market, by both supporting those who are currently not working, and nurturing existing skills to lay the foundations for future growth when international travel restarts.

This follows the news that a 6-month renewal of the Airport and Ground Operations Support Scheme has been approved as part of this year’s budget.

The scheme, initially launched in January 2021, supports airports and ground handlers with fixed costs while travel restrictions remain in place.

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said:

We’re supporting our aviation sector by launching an online jobs market to match aviation workers with 1,000s of vacancies, helping skilled workers regain high-value positions across this hugely important sector.

At the same time, we’re renewing our scheme to help airports and ground operators with their fixed costs. Grants of up to £4 million will be available, building on the success of the scheme launched in January.

The extension of government-backed loans and furlough payments announced at budget yesterday build on around £7 billion of support already pledged by government, benefiting the sector since the start of the pandemic. These measures will help ensure this vital and vibrant part of the UK economy is ready to bounce back in the wake of the pandemic.

With air travel likely to be lower than normal over the coming months, the renewal of the support scheme will provide airports with a financial boost through the summer by helping to cover fixed costs including:

• airfield operations
• contracted services such as airfield and runway maintenance
• business rates bills

From May, eligible commercial airports and ground operators will be able to apply for up to £4 million towards their fixed costs between April and September 2021, with payments expected by the end of summer.

This comes just one week after the government announced additional support for the sector, extending the ‘80:20’ slot waiver to provide airlines with much-needed flexibility through the summer months.

It also follows the first meeting of the government’s Global Travel Taskforce this week, which is working to develop a plan for restarting international travel safely and sustainably.

Whether you are an individual searching for your new home, a developer preparing a planning application or a government official updating a local plan, planning and housing location data plays a critical role in addressing the national challenge of providing housing that meets different needs. We know that location data alone cannot tackle this, but data innovation across housing and planning could have the potential to help build more houses where people want them.

To help this the Geospatial Commission has today published an independent Planning and Housing Review to take stock of how relevant housing data is currently being accessed and used, and whether more can be done to unlock greater insights and economic value for the UK.

The report identifies where the challenges and opportunities are for better leveraging geospatial data and also outlines what current and forthcoming geospatial initiatives participants of the review were aware of. The cross sector (government, private and third sector) challenges highlighted in the review are related to findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability of data and data standards.

The review also highlights the challenges associated with upskilling, recruiting and retaining staff with the necessary Geographic Information Systems (GIS) experience, as well as programming and data science skills, especially among local authorities. Whilst it is acknowledged that these challenges vary across sectors due to different organisations’ size, budget and the significance of geospatial data to the organisational objectives, the lack of geospatial skills and resources has a significant impact on the quality and accessibility of planning and housing data.

Overcoming the data issues evidenced in the review will require action by a wide range of organisations. No one organisation will solve these challenges working alone. However, by setting out the current landscape, we are now better able to identify key opportunity areas, and how we can collaborate across government and sectors to address them.

Thalia Baldwin, Geospatial Commission Director, said:

Location data is critically important to those operating within the planning and housing sectors. We have published this review of the housing location data landscape to help make it easier to understand what is happening in this complex area. The Geospatial Commission will be working with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, Homes England, HM Land Registry and across the housing and planning sector to consider our collective priorities for location data improvement.

Andrew Trigg, Director of Digital, Data and Technology at HM Land Registry added:

Maintaining and releasing land and property data is an important part of HM Land Registry’s work, and we see first-hand the role this data plays in every aspect of our work, from supporting conveyancing to enabling new and emerging applications. This report recognises the value and potential of making data more easily available at both the local and national level, and HMLR supports efforts to make data more findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. We’re excited to continue our work to grow and enhance freely available data to further strengthen its impact on the wider economy.

Housing and local planning is an opportunity area identified in the UK Geospatial Strategy which was launched last year and this review builds on last year’s release of Unique Property and Street Reference Numbers under the Open Government Licence to standardise referencing and sharing of address information about properties and streets across the public sector.

The Geospatial Commission has also brought together housing, land and planning geospatial datasets to signpost to more than 60 relevant open data sets and a list of over 300 planning and housing datasets.

You can read more about the review and the Commission’s work on housing and planning on our blog page.

Using research undertaken by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), Sentinel Photonics offers a unique range of laser detection and protection products. For the first time, protection from laser-based threats for dismounted soldiers is possible, potentially saving lives and improving survivability.

The technology detects and analyses invisible lasers used ahead of weapon systems to provide advance warning of attacks. Over time a bank of laser ‘signatures’ will be created that will identify and distinguish individual threat systems, enabling dismounted troops to take appropriate protective measures.

This disruptive technology not only offers a step change in size, weight, power, and cost, but also enhanced detection capabilities against laser threats on the battlefield.

This capability has attracted the attention of the UK Government and has resulted in 2 successful applications for development contract funding from the Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA).

Hetti Barkworth-Nanton, Sentinel’s Chief Executive Officer, said:

I would like to thank DASA for their support. These two grants, totalling £232,000, will help Sentinel accelerate its product development programme and will see demonstrator products in the hands of our end users by the end of the year. By the end of the summer, I’m also pleased to announce that we will be seeking to launch a Venture Funding round and would welcome preliminary discussions with interested parties.

A wide range of military and homeland security users will soon benefit from the assurance of having agile, next generation laser detection and protection in place. In addition to dismounted operators, a wide variety of land, sea and air platforms could be equipped with this capability.

Sentinel’s first product will be a novel camera-based Laser Event Recorder (LER) to detect both pulsed and continuous wave (CW) lasers. In due course it also plans to develop a range of optical filters to provide protection against laser threats to complement the LER detection capability.

Sean Tipper, Sentinel’s Chief Technology Officer, said:

I have been working in the electro-optics field at Dstl for more than 5 years and am excited to continue this journey as part of Sentinel Photonics. The cutting-edge work undertaken at Dstl to not only reduce the Size, Weight and Power (SWaP) of these technologies but also create entirely new capabilities and overcome existing limitations, is what makes Sentinel’s products unique and will help to prevent loss of life and improve mission effectiveness.

Sentinel Photonics was established in 2019 by Ploughshare Innovations, the technology transfer office of Dstl. Ploughshare commercialises innovations from across UK Government by either licensing to industry or creating spin-out companies. Sentinel Photonics is it latest novel spin-out and interested parties are invited to contact us about future seed round investment opportunities. For more information about Sentinel’s products visit http://sentinelphotonics.co.uk

In 2017, ICIBI reported on the identification and treatment of Potential Victims of Modern Slavery (PVoMS) by Border Force, following this up in 2018 with a re-inspection to check on progress made in implementing ICIBI’s recommendations.

Following discussions with the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner about where a further inspection might add most value, between October 2019 and April 2020 ICIBI examined the work being done by Border Force, Immigration Enforcement and UK Visas and Immigration to identify, investigate, disrupt and prosecute the perpetrators of modern slavery and human trafficking (MSHT).

The inspection found that while operational activity overall had increased since the Modern Slavery Strategy was launched in 2014, the work of the Home Office’s three Borders, Immigration and Citizenship System (BICS) operational directorates, and that of the wider Home Office, remained siloed and disjointed, with little evidence of a plan to address this.

BICS had had some success in focusing frontline staff on the identification and safeguarding of victims through the National Referral Mechanism (NRM), which was reflected in increased numbers of NRM referrals. It needed to build on this, particularly at the border, where the numbers were still low. But, it was not doing enough to combat the criminals who perpetrate, enable and exploit MSHT, and opportunities to do so were being missed.

The report was sent to the Home Secretary on 16 September 2020 and published on 4 March 2021 (24 weeks). It contained three recommendations, which together looked to reset the BICS response to MSHT. They stressed the importance of creating a clearer, more coherent set of roles, responsibilities and objectives for BICS, and also of ensuring that the Home Office Serious Organised Crime Group (SOCG), which held the departmental lead for MSHT, was more closely engaged with BICS regarding the latter’s efforts to tackle MSHT. Two of the recommendations were accepted and the third “partially accepted”.

In addition, the report repeated a recommendation from ‘An inspection of the Home Office’s response to in-country clandestine arrivals (‘lorry drops’)’ regarding a fundamental review of the criminal investigation and prosecution capabilities and capacity of BICS.

In November 2020, the Home Office “partially accepted” this recommendation, but declined to carry out a fundamental review. Instead, it would take ICIBI’s findings fully into account alongside the findings of the independent review of Serious and Organised Crime (SOC) led by Sir Craig Mackey QPM, which had reported to the Home Secretary in February 2020, and about which it would provide details “in due course”.

The Home Office’s latest response simply quotes its previous statement. It is unclear what progress it has made in the intervening four months. While the necessary improvements in capabilities and capacity will take time to implement, it would have been more encouraging to see reference to some specific actions and deadlines.