Pleased to be leading Greenwoods’ strategic land development advice, Jeremy Stanton highlights why he believes there are significant opportunities for land owners and developers across the region and offers his thoughts on the Housing White Paper.

There is an exciting momentum about Cambridge and Peterborough at the moment – one that has been driving the growth of East Anglia as a whole and looks set to do so well into the next decade. 

Some of this momentum is structural; the much needed and long awaited £1.5 billion improvement to the A14, the Alconbury/Huntingdon expansion, and the Cambridge to Oxford tech corridor/rail link, to name three important examples.

The last decade saw a huge amount of property development activity, both residential and commercial, in and around Cambridge and East Anglia as a whole. This facilitated the growth in population and business, with more development both planned and required to meet anticipated growth – be it the provision of housing, offices, shops, education, healthcare or infrastructure.

Cambridge and Peterborough are some 30 miles apart, a distance seemingly reducing year on year with each new housing development.

With a fluid A14 by 2020 (I am a believer) this should significantly reduce the regular journey time between the two cities. I see the two cities and their hinterlands sharing an increasingly symbiotic relationship, with Peterborough providing housing options for employees across the region with an excellent house price to earnings ratio making Peterborough attractive and affordable, and providing cheaper office space for less location specific expanding operations.

Cambridge, for the reasons we are all very aware of, is unique – a magnet for investment and growth, giving Cambridge and the region its international identity.

Peterborough will increasingly benefit from this proximity and can provide space and skills to meet a growing requirement from the Cambridge region, alongside its own growing business offering and identity.

I see a fluid A14 as an axis for growth between the two cities and beyond.  Joining Greenwoods, to lead the strategic Land team, with its offices and an established presence at either end of the A14 axis in Cambridge and Peterborough was a very logical decision.

The development opportunities in the region are real and tangible and as solicitors we need to be readily accessible to clients.

My arrival at Greenwoods coincided with the release of the Housing White Paper. Its heading “Fixing Our Broken Housing Market” is somewhat negative but some of the proposed measures will have a positive impact.

There is an increasing focus on brownfield sites where the presumption is in support of redevelopment for housing unless there are “clear and specific reasons to the contrary.”

This, combined with incentives to build higher where there is a shortage of land, will have a real impact on the region’s towns and city skylines.
 
Focus on reducing the timescale between grant of planning permission and delivery of the completed housing units may help quicker delivery of more units. However, house builders will always find ways to maintain the balance between demand, value and supply of units on their specific sites. 

The proposed support for smaller house builders and a focus on smaller sites as being a means of speeding up delivery of housing numbers I find really exciting, as this presents a real opportunity for smaller builders and developers to scale up.

One hundred per cent land registration by 2030 making transfer of land for housing and buying a house simpler makes absolute sense. Little  excites a land lawyer more than dusty bundles of unregistered deeds delivered in carrier bags late on a Friday afternoon, with a deal to bring to exchange early the next week!

I see clients increasingly needing expert advice re such matters as “right to light” as buildings reach higher, consideration of restrictive covenants with change of use from brownfield to residential, the triggering and effectiveness of overage provisions on change of use and uplift in values, registration of unregistered land, and – increasingly – planning related development agreements; promotion agreements, options and conditional contracts. 

• You can contact Jeremy Stanton on 01733 887634 or via email: jjstanton [at] greenwoods.co.uk

The ARM business model has inspired innovators, entrepreneurs, academics and now –  the cumulative deployment of 100 billion chips, half of which shipped in the last four years, writes ARM CEO Simon Segars. 

It is an amazing achievement but success does not belong to ARM alone, rather it is testament to the power of partnership.

And if partnership can create and deploy 100 billion chips, why not a trillion or more? That is our target, seeing a trillion connected devices deployed over the next two decades. And for that to happen, we must think carefully about the ecosystem and infrastructure required to support such a vast quantity of data-driven products.

NarrowBand-IoT

Connecting a trillion devices requires a range of enabling technologies. In the home that may be Wi-Fi or Bluetooth low energy. For devices operating remotely, in power-constrained environments and sending infrequent amounts of little data, there are new cellular-based technology standards delivered by the 3GPP Release 13 in 2016. 

That included NarrowBand-IoT (NB-IoT) and LTE Cat M1. We expect NB-IoT, an ultra-low-power wide-area connectivity (LPWAN) standard, to be a key enabler of a broad range of IoT applications and that is why we announced ARM Cordio-N NB-IoT radio technology last week. 

With broadly available IP from ARM, any chip designer will be able to integrate NB-IoT functionality into a product and reduce overall system costs.

Tadashi Iida, vice-president and head of the Mobile Technology Division at ARM parent SoftBank Corp agrees: “The industry is planning a complex network transformation to cope with the weight of devices that will connect over the next two decades.

“We will see advanced and efficient compute, security, storage, and connectivity from the edge of the system to the Cloud. NB-IoT will play an important role in this transformation as it lays a path towards the massive machine communications needs of 5G. ARM’s licensable IP, ARM Cordio-N NB-IoT modem will help hasten this path as it will enable developers to bring products to market faster, and at scale.” 

Built for purpose

For me, the beauty of NB-IoT is that it will enable the smallest embedded edge devices to send tiny amounts of data using licensed spectrum while being so efficient that devices may last for 10 years or more on a battery. 

Along with offering reliable quality of service, the standard is highly attractive to mobile network operators as it is relatively inexpensive to deploy on their existing cellular networks.

ARM’s IP technology and ecosystem offers a path to accelerate cellular IoT adoption by delivering a secure solution certified at the chip. By utilising the ARM ecosystem, we expect improved costs and time-to-market that will drive innovation for IoT and Enterprise solutions.”

Design to delivery – fast

Our aim now is to achieve network pre-certification of ARM Cordio-N NB-IoT IP. This would allow our chip and OEM partners to build secure connected products from the ground up to be secure and resilient enough to run on cellular networks.

If we succeed, along with our operator partners, we will have made it far easier and cheaper for developers to get to market. For anyone, trying to get a new device up and running as fast as possible out of the box, this will be a huge plus.

This is all part of ARM’s ultimate vision; to transform technology experiences through a total computing approach that creates a vast network of securely-connected smart devices that enhance every aspect of peoples’ lives. Today, alongside our 1,100 partners, we celebrate 100 billion ARM-based chips shipped, but that is only the start.

• This article first appeared on the ARM Community website

Cambridge entrepreneur Sherry Coutu today reveals groundbreaking figures underlining that women-led businesses are a major driving force in the UK economy with a huge payback in terms of jobs and revenue.

Coutu’s EdTech charity, Founders4Schools, has unveiled what she believes is the world’s first under-the-hood analysis – showing fast and high growth for companies steered by women entrepreneurs.

The annual revenue of women-led companies in the UK is growing at 28 per cent with an average turnover of £3.7 million, Coutu announced two days ahead of International Women’s Day.

The analysis is based on open-government and LinkedIn datasets comparing business leaders and company growth data. It reveals how companies led by women grow, perform and rank, identifying the fastest-growing and most dynamic women-led businesses across the UK.

Founders4Schools helps raise student aspirations by connecting them to inspirational business leaders creating jobs. It has compiled the data into live interactive maps, revealing the location of fast growth businesses led by women with revenues between £1m and £250m.

As well as showing the continued growth of these businesses, the data highlights the diversity of women-led companies. There were almost 900 (871) female-led businesses with revenue in this bracket in 2016 – a 14 per cent jump on last year.

The cumulative revenue added over £3 billion more to the UK economy than the previous year. The top 10 sectors include events, IT, computer software, insurance, recruitment and healthcare, and 66 per cent of the businesses are headquartered outside London.

Coutu said: “This International Women’s Day, we want to celebrate the impact that so many female business leaders are having on our economy.

“All around the country, women are creating jobs that drive our economy- and at the same time taking time out of their hectic schedules to support their community by helping in their local schools via Founders4Schools.

“Success is important, but seeing these business leaders standing up, holding their heads high and helping others, is an inspiration. I’m delighted that the research we are releasing highlights the extent to which women drive the growth in our economy and I could not be prouder that Founders4Schools is playing its part in helping students come into contact with these individuals as they explore possible career destinations provided by these women.”

To ensure the continued growth and economic impact of female-led businesses, Founders4Schools is launching a campaign to get more female founders into schools to inspire greater numbers of young women. Coutu will build on this message in addressing East of England executives at Business Weekly’s annual Awards dinner in Cambridge on March 22.

She plans to host several events across the country for female founders who already give up their time to speak at schools – starting this morning at the London Stock Exchange. As well as hosting two women only CEO summits focused on international expansion, Founders4Schools will also be encouraging all women playing a leading role in a growing business to sign up to founders4schools to ensure young girls are as inspired as the boys to start their own businesses and make serious contributions to the UK economy in the future.

Founders4Schools uses technology to make it easy and time efficient for teachers to connect students with local business leaders  to raise their students’ aspirations. To date, Founders4Schools has helped teachers all over the UK arrange over 124,000 student-employer encounters.

Coutu says that no other country has ever produced such detailed insight – “a clear indicator that the UK is the best place in the world for ambitious women to scale-up their global business operations.”
 

A giant data campus serving the Cambridge science & technology cluster is set to open up a powerful new silicon highway from the UK innovation hub to the United States.

The 700,000 sq ft Camro Data Campus on a 40-acre site in Sutton, just to the north of Cambridge, will boost digital connectivity by creating potent fibre routing to London and other key hubs in the UK.

Developer Lasercharm has appointed property specialist Carter Jonas to drive occupier marketing at the campus. The announcement coincides with the major milestone of the completion of the brand new on-site primary substation.

Advised by Aecom and Noveus, Lasercharm has delivered secure power of 6MVA (Mega Volt Amp)  with an additional 19MVA second phase to follow to provide a total of 25MVA from the grid. In power output terms that is mega muscle. Further on-site, off-grid generation is planned.

Camro is strategically located to exploit open access diverse fibre routing to London’s major connection points, to ‘Points of Presence’ (POPs) to the north and south and a key east/west fibre route with links to the US and Europe without routing via London.

George Fellowes of Carter Jonas, said: “We are excited to be involved with the team on Camro. It is a real step ahead of what has been available in this sector offering real flexibility and speed to market.

“Aside from its power and fibre, what makes this site truly exceptional is its exclusive proximity to the leading scientific and technological centre in Cambridge.

“From this point it can also provide a direct link with London just 45 minutes away and with the commercial centres in the north and others in the south.”
 

A top five global player in the fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) space has chosen Cambridge technology to protect its systems against cyber attacks.

Darktrace, a UK-headquartered world leader in Enterprise Immune System technology, is unable to name the client for security reasons.

The consumer goods giant has decided to invest more than $1m to protect its critical assets from all types of threats including zero-days, ransomware, and silent and stealthy insider and ‘trust attacks’.

Darktrace has grown in quickfire fashion to become arguably the world’s leading machine learning company for cyber security.

Created by mathematicians from the University of Cambridge, the Enterprise Immune System uses AI algorithms to automatically detect and take action against cyber-threats within all types of networks, including physical, cloud and virtualised networks, as well as IoT and industrial control systems. Powered by unsupervised machine learning, Darktrace is a self-configuring platform that autonomously learns about a network’s ‘normal’ pattern-of-life and detects anomalies in real time.

The Enterprise Immune System has now identified 30,000 serious in-progress threats in more than 2,000 networks to date.

CEO Nicole Eagan said: “As the volume and sophistication of cyber-attacks has increased exponentially, companies of all sizes and across all sectors are turning to immune system technologies for cyber defence.

“We have seen unprecedented demand for the Enterprise Immune System as the world’s first comprehensive AI platform for cyber security.”

Headquartered in San Francisco and Cambridge UK, Darktrace now has a network of 23 offices worldwide.