Sellafield Ltd, through its SiX (social impact, multiplied) programme, has announced a major investment in LEVELS, a ground-breaking £4.6 million redevelopment of the former Whittles department store in Whitehaven, West Cumbria into a state-of-the-art immersive entertainment and education centre.
Delivered and developed by social impact property developers BEC, LEVELS has transformed a Grade II-listed building into a cutting-edge hub for digital creativity, learning, and interactive experiences.
Across 4 floors, the centre features immersive digital and gaming experiences, an esports arena, interactive learning spaces, and a café—creating a vibrant space for education and creativity in the heart of Whitehaven.
By equipping young people with the skills needed for a digital-first future, the project aims to engage young people, their families, and educators, inspiring the next generation to explore careers in digital and creative technology.
Funding for the project includes £3.3 million from Sellafield Ltd through its SiX programme, alongside £800,000 in funding, equipment, and logistical support from BT, Atos, and Openreach—as part of their social impact commitments through Information and Communications Technology contracts with Sellafield Ltd.
BEC has also contributed £500,000, demonstrating the power of partnership to multiply impact.
Tracey West, Sellafield Ltd’s head of social impact, said:
LEVELS represents exactly what our SiX programme is about—creating lasting social impact by investing in skills, innovation, and opportunity. By collaborating with partners like BEC and our supply chain, we’re helping West Cumbria’s young people prepare for a digital future.
This investment builds on our long-standing commitment to improving education provision in West Cumbria, following projects such as West Lakes Academy, the Whitehaven Campus, the National College for Nuclear, and the Well programme.
The dollar moved to a one-month high as rising US Treasury yields and looming risk events kept investors cautious ahead of Friday’s payrolls report and a possible Supreme Court ruling on President Donald Trump’s tariffs. A four-day advance put the greenback on track for its strongest week since November, while the yen lagged most major peers. Treasuries extended Thursday’s slide, with the 10-year yield rising two basis points to 4.19%, and S&P 500 futures hovered near flat as markets weighed whether upcoming data could challenge expectations for US interest-rate cuts later in 2026.
Equities faced mixed signals as policy headlines and corporate developments pulled sentiment in different directions. Trump’s proposed $200 billion mortgage-bond purchase plan lifted mortgage-linked stocks, with LoanDepot (NYSE:LDI) and Rocket Companies (NYSE:RKT) jumping in premarket trading. In Europe, Glencore (GLNCY) rose more than 8% in London after resuming talks with Rio Tinto (NYSE:RIO) on a potential combination that could create the world’s largest miner, though broader risk appetite remained restrained ahead of two closely timed macro catalysts.
Attention is now centered on December payrolls, where economists surveyed by Bloomberg expect 70,000 new jobs and an unemployment rate easing to 4.5%, data that could shape expectations for Federal Reserve policy. Markets are fully pricing at least two quarter-point rate cuts in 2026, with odds favoring an initial move in April, although traders warned that outcomes at either extreme could unsettle markets. In parallel, investors are monitoring the Supreme Court’s pending decision on Trump’s tariffs, which could allow companies to seek refunds on billions of dollars in duties, while oil, gold, and silver traded cautiously amid developments involving Venezuela and Iran.
Value for money is at the heart of everything we do. Wandsworth is investing in new homes and estate improvements that create lifelong assets for the borough. These homes not only pay for themselves through rental income but also reduce reliance on costly temporary accommodation. Thanks to strengthened prevention work, Wandsworth is now avoiding an additional £3.7 million in temporary accommodation costs every year.
Wandsworth’s Housing Revenue Account, a ringfenced fund dedicated to council housing, is in a significantly stronger position than that of many other stock holding authorities. This strong financial position enables the council to continue ambitious regeneration and development plans while maintaining essential investment in existing homes.
A key milestone was recently reached as the Homes for Wandsworth programme celebrated the completion of its 500th new council home, marking the halfway point toward the borough’s pledge to deliver 1,000 new homes for local residents.
Building on this momentum, the council has announced a landmark partnership with Battersea Power Station to deliver 200 new high quality council homes within the development’s 42 acre masterplan, further expanding opportunities for families in need of secure, affordable housing.
Aydin Dikerdem, Cabinet Member for Housing, said: “Investing in new council homes is one of the most powerful tools we have to tackle the housing crisis and strengthen our communities. Every new home means a family moved off a waiting list and into a secure, comfortable home. And it also saves us money in the long-term, delivering a public asset and reducing expensive temporary accommodation costs. It’s an investment not just in buildings, but in the future of Wandsworth.”
Together, these initiatives reflect Wandsworth’s strategic, long term commitment to ensuring that every resident has access to a safe, secure, and high quality place to call home.
Impersonation scams are rising, with fraudsters posing as trusted organisations or individuals. Residents are urged to verify all contact and report suspicious activity.
The warning follows incidents in the borough where several residents have reported being targeted by fraudsters. In one report, a resident was contacted by someone pretending to be a “Senior Trading Standards Investigator” from the Chartered Institute of Trading Standards. Another case involved an online investment ad falsely linked to the UK Prime Minister – this was generated using AI. Text messages regarding parking have also been received from fraudsters claiming to be associated with Bromley Council.
Other common impersonations include banks and police, with these scams often being linked to courier fraud. Fraudsters typically reach out via phone calls, texts, emails, or social media. If impersonating a friend or family member, they may claim urgent need for money, gift cards, or help paying bills.
Protect yourself
Pause before you click or reply. Is it genuine? Verify with someone you trust.
Your bank or the police will never ask you to transfer money to a “safe account”.
If you receive a suspicious call, hang up and call the real organisation on a trusted number – ideally from a different phone or after waiting a while.
Never share one-time passcodes or personal details unless you initiated contact.
If you are looking for an investment opportunity, check the FCA InvestSmart website first.
Report and information
Contact your bank if you have given your financial details. Call 159 – Stop Scams UK.
Contact Citizens Advice for help and advice on 0808 223 1133 or on the Citizens Advice website.
Report fraud on 0300 123 2040 or on the Report Fraud website.
Forward suspicious emails to report@phishing.gov.uk.
Report suspicious text messages to your phone provider on 7726.
Report a suspicious website via the National Cyber Security Centre website.
You can also visit the council website for more Trading Standards advice on doorstep crime and scams.
If you have any doubts about someone claiming to be from or associated with the London Borough of Bromley, call 020 8464 3333.
Visit the council website for more information on Bromley Parking Services.
Learn more about how to protect yourself from impersonation fraud on the Take Five – Stop Fraud website.
Learn more about courier fraud on the Report Fraud website.
For more information on the wider ‘scam-scape’, visit the Which? website for an article of the biggest scams of 2025.
For general information about scams in various languages visit the Friends Against Scams website.
Bromley Trading Standards
To keep up with the latest scam alerts and warnings from Bromley Trading Standards sign up on www.bromley.gov.uk/TradingStandardsAlertSignUpForm.
Bromley Trading Standards also runs a fair-trader directory to help you find a safe, reliable trader that you can trust, visit www.bromley.gov.uk/tradingstandardschecked to learn more.
Squire Patton Boggs has advised the shareholders of Delmont Imaging on the sale of the company to Rocamed. This acquisition brings together two highly complementary French MedTech players with strong international presence.
The team advising Delmont Imaging was led by Paris Corporate partners Charles Fabry and Anthony Guillaume, assisted by Victor Dransard and Elise Crouzil.
Delmont Imaging, founded in 2016, is focused on improving care and healthcare measures for women by providing gynecological surgeons with innovative solutions. Its products, dedicated to diagnostic and surgical uterine procedures, are now registered in more than 50 countries across the world. Founded in 2011, Rocamed is a global medical device company specializing in endo-urology, developing, manufacturing and distributing a complete product range for urology, with a strong focus on stone management and prostate treatment.
At a Cabinet meeting on January 19, councillors will discuss and decide whether to accept a further grant from the Government’s Local Authority Housing Fund (LAHF) to increase the availability of temporary accommodation in the district – vital for supporting families in need.
So far, NNDC has used grants totalling £1.633m from the LAHF to help acquire 14 homes.
Grants from the LAHF include a requirement to make some of the accommodation available for families under the national Afghan Resettlement programme, although so far, no Afghan families have taken up homes in North Norfolk.
Cllr Jill Boyle, portfolio holder for Housing, said:
“Funding from the LAHF has allowed the council to provide vital accommodation for North Norfolk families. The increased availability of suitable family homes is key to addressing housing need and homelessness in our area – a really important issue for this council.
“So far, none of the properties have been assigned to Afghan families, but the UK Government has made clear we all have a responsibility to these people who provided vital assistance to the UK Military during the Afghan conflicts, and some whose safety was put at risk by a data incident.
“Our success in providing temporary accommodation has also been boosted by the second homes council tax premium. Money from the premium has been ringfenced to support housing need in our area. Both approaches have made a real difference for North Norfolk families.”
The latest episode of the IEA’s Everything Energy podcast looks at the changes taking place in the global car industry, which is a key part of many economies with important implications for the energy sector.
The global car industry has operated under relatively stable conditions for decades. Now, that’s shifting as the geography of production evolves, new regions drive sales growth, and electric cars transform consumer choices.
Now available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, the episode features insights from IEA Energy Technology Analysts Elizabeth Connelly and Leonardo Paoli – the lead authors of a recent report on this subject. They unpack the structural trends – examining the underlying drivers, assessing the potential implications for the energy sector and beyond, and discussing how competitiveness can be sustained in this market context, while noting there is no one-size-fits-all approach.
The IEA’s Everything Energy podcast offers fresh perspectives on a wide range of global energy issues through conversations with IEA experts.
Previous episodes cover the vast potential of geothermal energy, nuclear energy’s comeback, energy and AI, what’s next for electric cars and trucks, key energy investment trends, the forces shaping oil markets, growing demand for air conditioning, efforts to expand clean cooking access, where the world’s electricity comes from, petrochemicals, Southeast Asia’s growing energy importance, Ukraine’s energy security this coming winter, major findings in this year’s World Energy Outlook, the future of solar power, how to bring power to 600 million people and the shifting geography of energy demand.
Stuart Morrison, Research Manager, British chambers of Commerce
The latest Quarterly Economic Survey (QES)[1] from the BCC’s Insights Unit once again highlights price pressures as a central concern for UK businesses. Just over half (52%) of firms report that they expect to raise prices over the coming months, reflecting ongoing cost challenges. While the QES is not designed as a formal inflation forecast, its price expectations measure has, over time, proved to be a useful barometer of inflationary pressure in the wider economy.
To understand what the Q4 2025 results are telling us, it helps to place them in a longer-run context.
What the QES price expectations measure captures
Each quarter, the QES asks firms whether they expect to increase, decrease, or hold prices over the next three months. The results are usually presented as the proportion (or net balance) of businesses expecting price rises. This is a forward-looking indicator, rooted in firms’ own assessments of costs, margins, and market conditions.
Crucially, the measure reflects intentions, not outcomes. Businesses may plan to raise prices but later adjust those plans in response to weak demand or competitive pressure. For that reason, QES price expectations should be read as a signal of inflationary momentum, not a point forecast for CPI.
A historic perspective
Looking back over the decades of QES data, a clear pattern emerges. Periods when a large share of firms report plans to raise prices have tended to coincide with, or slightly precede, periods of elevated UK inflation. Conversely, when price expectations in the QES have eased, official inflation has usually followed suit with a lag.
This relationship has been especially visible since the pandemic. As supply chains tightened, energy prices surged, and labour costs rose, QES price expectations climbed to historically high levels. In Q2 2022, 65% of QES respondents said that they expected their prices to rise. By October of that year, CPI inflation had peaked at 11.1%. When those pressures began to unwind, the proportion of firms planning price increases also fell, broadly tracking the disinflation seen in official data.
Source: BCC QES Q4 2025
The link is not mechanical or perfectly timed. Inflation is shaped by many forces beyond business pricing plans, including global energy markets, exchange rates, fiscal policy, and monetary conditions. But the direction of travel in the QES has consistently aligned with the direction of travel in inflation.
What makes the QES a useful indicator
The strength of the QES lies in its timeliness and breadth. It captures real-time intelligence from thousands of firms across sectors and regions, often well before official statistics are available. For policymakers, analysts, and businesses, this provides early insight into whether price pressures are building or easing on the ground.
At the same time, history shows why caution is warranted. QES price expectations tend to be better at signalling whether inflationary pressure is present than at predicting how high inflation will go or how quickly it will fall. In periods of weak demand, firms’ ability to pass on costs can be constrained, even when cost pressures are intense.
Interpreting the Q4 results
Against this backdrop, the Q4 QES results suggest that inflationary pressure remains embedded in the business environment. While expectations are below the peaks seen during the height of the inflation surge, they remain elevated by historical standards. This points to ongoing cost-push pressures, particularly from labour, energy, and regulatory costs, rather than a renewed acceleration in demand.
As we move into 2026, the central question is likely to be whether businesses can absorb these persistent costs without passing them on. If not, inflation could remain a defining feature of the UK economy.
The historic relationship between QES price expectations and official inflation suggests that this persistence matters. Elevated expectations tend to be consistent with inflation remaining above target for longer, even if headline rates continue to ease gradually.
What this means for inflation in 2026
The lesson from the past decade is not that the QES “predicts” inflation, but that it offers an early and reliable signal of inflationary stress within the business community. The Q4 results reinforce the view that, while inflation has come down from its highs, the journey back to more stable price growth is unlikely to be smooth.
Looking ahead, persistently elevated price expectations have important implications for the policy and economic outlook. For the Bank of England, they suggest a case for caution on the pace of interest rate cuts, even as headline inflation continues to ease. If firms still expect to raise prices, underlying inflationary pressure may prove more stubborn than recent data alone imply.
For policymakers, this underlines the importance of tackling the structural drivers of costs facing firms. For businesses, it highlights a trading environment where pricing decisions remain difficult, margins remain under pressure, and uncertainty persists.
As ever, the QES provides a timely snapshot of these realities, and a reminder that inflation is not shaped by nebulous statistics, but by the decisions businesses are faced with every day.
In a new report published today in the journal Nature Plants, researchers based at more than 50 botanic gardens and living plant collections warn that a patchwork of incompatible, or even absent, data systems is undermining global science and conservation at a critical moment.
They call for a unified and equitable global data system for living collections to transform how the world’s botanic gardens manage and share information. This would enable them to work together as a ‘meta-collection’ to strengthen scientific research and conservation efforts.
Climate change, invasive species, habitat loss and increased global movement of plant material all require rapid access to high-quality, trusted information about living plants. Achieving this depends on a shared culture of open, accurate, and affordable data – allowing living collections of all sizes, particularly in the Global South where much of the world’s biodiversity is located, to participate on equal terms.
Curator of Cambridge University Botanic Garden Professor Samuel Brockington, who led the work together with researchers at Botanic Gardens Conservation International, said: “The digital infrastructure needed to manage, share, and safeguard living plant diversity wasn’t designed to operate at a global scale.”
He added: “We’ve built an extraordinary global network of living plant collections, but we’re trying to run twenty-first-century conservation with data systems that are fragmented, fragile, and in many cases inaccessible to scientists and conservationists working where most biodiversity originates. We urgently need a shared data system so the people managing collections can work together as a coordinated whole.”
Thaís Hidalgo de Almeida, Curator of Living Collections, Jardim Botânico do Rio de Janeiro and a co-author of the report, said: “Having an integrated and equitable global data ecosystem would greatly help us address urgent conservation needs in biodiversity-rich countries like Brazil, making our work faster, more collaborative, and more effective.”
Scientific research in many areas depends on accurate, well-documented living plant material. As climate change accelerates extinction risk, living plant collections are increasingly used to support species and ecosystem restoration, and climate-adapted urban planting.
Yet many collections remain undigitised, and those that are often rely on incompatible systems shaped by institutional or commercial priorities rather than shared standards. As a result, vital information on threatened species, climate resilience, provenance, and legal status cannot be shared efficiently between institutions or across borders.
“In healthcare, fragmented and proprietary data systems are recognised as a serious risk and the focus of major public investment,” said Brockington. “In plant conservation, we face the same problem, but without treating the data as critical public infrastructure.”
At least 105,634 plant species – representing around one third of all plant species in the world – are grown in the world’s 3,500 botanic gardens. As much as 40% of the world’s plant diversity is at elevated risk of extinction and these living collections form a critical safety net against that.
Organisations like Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI) have already established the foundations of a better data system but the researchers say coordinated, considered investment is now needed to create a long-lasting and trusted resource.
Paul Smith, Secretary-General, BGCI and a co-author of the report, said: “In an era of accelerating biodiversity loss, harnessing the full conservation potential of living collections requires a step-change in how collections data are documented, standardised and connected through a global data ecosystem. This publication, supported by more than fifty gardens worldwide sets the stage for achieving that transformation.”
Last year, Brockington announced his previous report showing how living collections metadata could be used to give global insights into the acquisition and conservation of the world’s plant diversity.
References:
Brockington, S.F. et al: ‘High-performance living plant collections require a globally integrated data ecosystem to meet twenty-first-century challenges.’ Nature Plants, Jan 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41477-025-02192-6
Cano, A. et al: ‘Insights from a century of data reveal global trends in ex situ living plant collections.’ Nature Ecology and Evolution, Jan 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41559-024-02633-z
