The literature festival's most influential gathering of authors ever?
Possibly the most influential group of authors and publishers at a Cheltenham Literature Festival event ever gathered last week to discuss a topic within their grasp – the security of our very nation.
Dear Readers,
Welcome to your first edition of The Raikes Journal of the week. Those who have followed the social media channels business people keep their eyes on over the last few days will have seen numerous posts about Cheltenham Literature Festival, and some of them about a particular event at the Hub8 MX centre - that new building next to the town’s Minster.
We home in on what happened in that building on Thursday last week for today’s main story. What began as an attempt to report on all that was said at the event by everyone who was there has been stripped back somewhat (there was just too much!), but we hope our story reveals a little of what we think the bigger messages were from the afternoon.
And those messages point to what we big-up as a gathering of probably the most influential group of authors and publishers coming together in one room at the literature festival ever.
Some of those present will probably change your lives, very probably make them safer and more secure, and yet you will never know any of their names or read a single line of anything they ever write or publish. You simply won’t be allowed to.
And lastly, neither were they on stage - they were in the audience, but they are key to something very exciting happening right here in Gloucestershire that the likes of the Western Gateway, one of the event sponsors and an emerging voice of the West of England and South Wales’s economy, very much want to be associated with.
You can find out more about that below, of course, along with some of our usual briefing notes and a charity of the week.
And speaking of weeks, we hope you have a good one!
Just six months into our relaunch we feel safe to say that while other platforms may send newsletters to substantially bigger email databases, our Monday email edition is read by more people than read any other ‘business news’ story on any other website or email newsletter in Gloucestershire.
If you are interested in becoming one of the stable of businesses backing Raikes and making all this possible please email andrew.merrell@raikesjournal.co.uk or telephone 07956 926061.
Your briefing notes
🏗️ 🐟💷 After years of trying to get its ambitious plans over the line Forest of Dean firm Severn and Wye Smokery has been given permission to invest £50 million transforming the former Pine End Works on Harbour Road in Lydney. The development is the brainchild of smokery owner Richard Cook, who founded the business in 1989 and has grown it into a company of 240 staff with a turnover of £50 million a year. Plans include a 180-plus seater restaurant with a covered balcony, a cafe, visitor centre, new pedestrian and cycling access, buildings to house eel pools, accommodation for staff, parking for HGVs and more. You can read our full story here.
💷 Measurement specialist Sempre Group, a Gloucester-based firm that works with more than 25 “well-known manufacturers”, including the likes of county engineering giant Renishaw, has been sold for £5.5 million. The Barnwood-based business, which was founded in 2000, is said to have a “deep industrial knowledge and an established sales and services organisation”, as well as a profitable track record driven by annual growth revenues of eight per cent over the last four years. Read the full story in our Reports & Deals channel, sponsored by Randall & Payne, here.
🔎 Oliver Bruce, the founder and ceo of Cheltenham’s PinPoint Media, has been named as ‘one to watch’ in The LDC Top 50 Most Ambitious Business Leaders programme for 2024. Bruce, who founded the creative marketing agency while still at the University of Gloucestershire aged 19, also has ADHD, dyslexia and dyspraxia and is a passionate champion of neurodiversity. The Top 50 celebrates entrepreneurs demonstrating remarkable ambition and is backed by investment partner LDC, part of Lloyds Banking Group.
🏆 The increasingly important role data plays in driving down Scope 3 emissions will be the key focus of Commercial’s Scope for Change Supplier Day this month, which will also see the Cheltenham business give awards to its suppliers in recognition of their efforts. It will welcome key suppliers, partners and clients to the one-day event at the Leonardo Hotel in Cheltenham on Thursday 24 October. In case you were wondering, Scope 3 emissions are not produced by the company itself and are not the result of activities from assets owned or controlled by that company.
🏉 If you frequent LinkedIn and managed to focus amidst the maelstrom of information streaming past you may well have spotted a post from one of Raike’s Founding Partners, Randall & Payne. The county accountants has been alerting everyone to its forthcoming Budget event at Gloucester Rugby’s Kingsholm stadium on Wednesday 30 October. To find out more email marketing@randall-payne.co.uk.
🔊 Another dairy date for you! On the Thursday 17 October, the 2024 Convention for the Western Gateway will bring together businesses, academics, Government and leaders to discuss how together they can develop an economy fit for the future. Led by the Western Gateway Partnership, the event will highlight the potential of South Wales and Western England (including Gloucestershire) to lead the way globally in creating sustainable economic growth. This Convention will also see the launch of Western Gateway’s Plan for Sustainable Growth. Find out more and how to attend here.
Charity of the week: Cheltenham Open Door
We’ve mentioned Cheltenham Open Door before, but this was a chance to give them another outing with a few more words. The picture above was taken on World Mental Health Day last week, when members of law firm Willans LLP’s charity committee (pictured above) were welcomed on board to do some volunteering at the the charity’s guest centre. Their efforts enabled the charity to cook and serve more than 80 meals that day. That’s actually the number the organisation, which offers food, support and friendship to anyone who steps through its door, conjures up on a daily basis. As Cheltenham Open Door says of itself, it’s a ‘small charity with a big heart’. The team from Willans survived, calling the experience ‘a privilege’. You can find out more about Cheltenham Open Door here.
* Everything you read on The Raikes Journal is made possible by our Founding Partners: QuoLux, Willans LLP, Gloucestershire College, Merrell People and Randall & Payne, our sponsors Hartpury University and Hartpury College, our Founding Members and wonderful paying subscribers.
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The most influential gathering of authors and publishers ever?
Possibly the most influential group of authors and publishers ever at a Cheltenham Literature event gathered last week to discuss a topic well within their grasp – the security of our very nation.
By Andrew Merrell.
As the main Cheltenham Literature Festival was in full swing on Thursday last week it was a fringe show that drew the attention of some of the county’s key business figures and decision makers, with the town’s MP also determined to make sure he addressed the room.
While the writers were on stage at the main events at the Town Hall at this particular side show they were in the audience – authors of a very different kind, but without doubt some of the most influential of their generation.
Perverserly, although their work is of consequence to us all it will be read by none of us, sold in a marketplace we will never see, where the stakes are high and the sums of money changing hands significant, where governments takes note and customers are businesses and organisations we have never heard of.
The language they mostly write is computer code and the ideas they have create our omnipresent digital world, have the power to change all our lives, our identities even, alter our health outcomes, help us to communicate and provide us with vital personal, financial, national and energy security.
And it was security that was the subject of the event - headlined 24.3: Securing the UK’s Future Through Technology - a series of talks and networking staged by the influential Cheltenham-based group CyNam, which represents Gloucestershire’s nationally important cluster of cyber businesses and connections.
Main sponsors were the team behind The Golden Valley, the £1 billion tech park development planned for beside GCHQ, plus the Western Gateway, the voice of trade and commerce in the West of England and South Wales, and Government-funded Barclays Eagle Labs, but also evident was the support of the likes of Gloucestershire College and the University of Gloucestershire.
Anyone who understands the value of cyber wanted to be in this space on this day. This was the inhabitants of the county’s cyber sector world coming out to play and to make more valuable connections.
That cluster of businesses and organisation outnumbers any other such group outside London, and its sphere of influence is expected to grow beyond our scope and help drive our county and nation’s economy.
Among their number are innovative start-ups solving all sorts of security issues to major international defence firms, representatives whose roles are all about national security, through to academia, agriculture, finance and even the space sector.
It is difficult for us to prove to you just how popular this event really was - the umpteen pictures of the audience were vetted so as not to identify anyone.
Why? The tentacles of that aforementioned Government spy base (GCHQ) reach well within the Minster Exchange (MX) centre where the event was staged, and as sociable and keen on collaboration the cyber world is discretion comes first.
The MX building, for those who don’t yet know it, is a partnership between cyber workplace specialists Hub8, Plexal, and Cheltenham Borough Council, and situated beside the town’s oldest building, its Minster.
We’re fluffing the scene up a little, of course – but only a little.
When Alexander Giles, head of innovation at Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, stood up to talk about the adoption of deep tech and AI in the health service, he did so to a packed room of 200-plus and couldn’t help but comment on the numbers in front of him.
“I understand it was a choice between me and Boris Johnson,” he joked, suggesting the reason so many were at the MX could be that the devisive powers of the former Prime Minister, who was speaking at another festival venue at the same time, were still strong.
Giles told the room the first child had been born in Cheltenham General who would live to 150 years old, that the hospital was trialing ‘very effective cancer vaccines’ and was one of the few centres in the country to put into practice a treatment that would eradicate blindness.
Those advancements in our health outcomes, he said, reflected the abilities of the staff here in Gloucestershire and a new reality, but were only the beginning of what could be achieved - if the NHS was ever able to harness the power of its data.
That, he suggested, was the Holy Grail of challenges for the likes of those seated in the MX centre - and a challenge coming down the line, coupled with the unenviable task of making that data safe and secure too.
You could see the eyes in the room light up at the thought of the challenge!
Giles’ presence was part of the big overarching statement the CyNam event made to us here at Raikes – that cyber/digital is everywhere and in every aspect of our lives and if we can harness it and the data it can deliver it will be life-changing beyond our imagination.
In other words, the cyber world may still be cloaked in secrecy but it is no longer separate from any of us or any industry - and the profile of the panelists at the event underlined that. Few of them were from the inner world of cyber itself.
Neill Ricketts, a member of the first line-up to take to the stage, is chief executive officer of 720 Group, executive chairman of gas sensor company, GSS Ltd, and former CEO of Versarien PLC, a member of the Forest of Dean Economic Partnership and a former GFirst LEP board member.
He too spotted the change of messaging and posture of his new friends from the digital world.
“I think the cyber sector could be accused of being in a silo in the past, but it definitely seemed more open,” he said.
Suddenly, wherever you looked, the message was there.
Bruce Gregory, of CyNam and one of the key players helping bring both the Hub8 concept, the MX and the cyber community together, opened the event with these words.
“Whether it is health security, food security, energy security, financial security – we’ll be discussing what role that plays in our future,” he said, introducing the aims of the conference.
It’s the line also coming from The Golden Valley now too, the £1 billion tech park and housing development planned for beside GCHQ, so long talked about as the key to making Cheltenham ‘the cyber capital of the UK’. That’s still the aim, but not the message.
Matt Belshaw, director and head of region at HBD, the business chosen to lead The Golden Valley project for the borough council, was also one of the speakers at the Hub8 MX.
“The life-blood of this (cyber) economy is how everyone works together, from start-ups to bigger businesses.
“That is what we are going to build and develop. We are no longer talking about cyber as vertical sector, it’s horizontal,” said Belshaw.
A vertical market being one in which vendors offer goods and services specific to an industry with specialised needs. A horizontal market one in which a product or service meets the needs of a wide range of buyers across different sectors of an economy.
As for the Golden Valley Project itself, it was progressing well, he said.
“We are going forward with our planning application. The first building is expected to be ready by 2026.
“We are oversubscribed for the first building already. We have engaged designers to work on the next one. It is an exciting time and we are basing ourselves here in the MX now,” said Belshaw.
Along with the powerful cyber cluster, The Golden Valley Project is the other major factor that’s earned Gloucestershire a place at the top table of the emerging Western Gateway.
The pan-regional partnership is working to create a powerful and influential voice for the West of England and South Wales to ensure its economic ambitions receive their due private and public investment.
Some feel the Golden Valley will need that influence going forward.
Steph Jary, deputy director of Western Gateway, told the conference: “We are really excited to be parnering with CyNam. We are also very excited to be at the heart of the most developed cyber cluster in Europe.
“Gloucestershire has six times the number of cyber security firms as anywhere else in the UK and they produce a third of all cyber patents that come out of the UK.”
The Western Gateway area, said Jary, represented 4.8 million people, 2.6 million jobs and an economy worth £129 billion.
“It’s pretty substantial,” said Jary.
She added: “We want to grow the cyber cluster to one that can be seen from space, that can compete on a truly global scale.”
Joining Ricketts for the first panel discussion was Asif Rehmanwala, chief executive officer of Stroud-headquartered Ecotricity and Green Britain Group, Tim Mays, of the University of Bath and Ben Thompson, head of projects and business engagement at Hartpury University and Hartpury College.
Questionmaster for the session was Raechel Kelly of Planet Cheltenham.
“I think we are at a tipping point like never before. I think AI is coming faster than many of us are really realising,” said Ricketts, explaining not just a desire to embrace technology and the excitement, but also pointing to the anxiety being created by the speed of its arrival.
All the panel agreed that ensuring the benefits from the advancements in technology were delivered quickly was about better understanding the data AI could deliver - coping with the sheer volume, even.
Better communication and education across sectors and communities was part of the solution too, with all members agreeing that a better understanding would deliver more investment and help relieve that anxiety, especially around AI and jobs.
For Rehmanwala, who was on the panel representing power company Ecotricity, achieving energy security for the UK was not just about digital tech and cyber security – it was about speeding up the transition towards greener sources of power and a system that was more flexible for suppliers.
Renewable energy was the route towards self-sufficiency for the UK, he said, and a major step towards that security.
That solution included embracing a variety of technologies, including ground source heat pumps, battery storage for domestic properties, wind and solar.
And he agreed with Professor Mays that the mix of solutions included hydrogen – for domestic and industrial purposes.
But perhaps the biggest challenge, said Rehmanwala, was modernising the national grid - infrastructure built to serve a nation once reliant on coal and gas and now not fit for purpose, not to mention owned by a small number of overseas businesses and individuals.
If the Western Gateway was worried how a talk about some of its interests outside of Gloucestershire, even those across the border into Wales, would be received it needn’t have been. It proved still more inspiration about just what is going on in this part of the UK.
Sarah Kocianski, CEO of FinTech Wales, an independent membership association and champion of the FinTech and Financial Services industry in Wales, introduced the room to the South Wales sector she represents.
That cluster is made up of banks including Starling, Monzo and Tandem banks, Admiral, Confused.com, LexisNexis Risk Solutions, Principality Building Society, Yoello, Sonovate, Wealthify, Delio, Sero, Final Rentals and more.
In short, the Western Gateway/South Wales patch has become a serious hot spot for the UK’s online banking and insurance industry - all of it built on innovative approaches to technology - said Kocianski.
Kocianski was in conversation with Dr Ketch Adeeko, from the University of Bristol, and together they explored not only the thriving Tech Wales scene but Future Finance to highlight how inclusion and equitable access to services must be at the heart of innovation.
For those in the audience by now craving a fix of pure cyber it came in a brilliant speech from Scott Francis, chief technology officer of US firm Trust Stamp.
In a short talk he distilled the journey of the former NCSC start-up, a firm now described as ‘operating at the intersection of biometrics, privacy and cyber security’, and a business that has secured million of pounds in investment and boasts a growing turnover in the region of £3.5 million.
Being part of the Gloucestershire cyber cluster and falling under the wing of the NCSC For Startups, the scheme run by National Cyber Security Centre that supports private sector cyber businesses, had been invaluable, said Francis.
“The connections and networks you will create is what will make you a success. GCHQ (NCSC falls under its wing) gives you access to people who think like no one else in the world. Those relationships will come back to benefit you again and again,” he said.
The conference concluded with a discussion about securing the future through deep tech, a session that explored advancements in AI, quantum technologies, space, and compound semiconductors, with insights from Rachel von Hossle, Kimberley Brook of Capital Enterprise, Craig Needham of the UK Space Agency, Professor Adam Joinson from the University of Bath, Alistair Sharp of Capgemini Invent, and Howard Rupprecht of CS Connected.
Those in the audience on the day we are allowed to identify included Ruth Dooley, partner at Hazlewoods Accounts, former leader of GFirst LEP, and current member of Gloucestershire’s economic development board, the University of Gloucestershire and the Western Gateway.
“It is encouraging to see so many here in support of what is going on in Gloucestershire and the Western Gateway and potential all this has for the county and beyond,” said Dooley.
Tom Gastrell, partner at Wiggin, was another who used the day for the incredible opportunity it was, to also network among a rich field of potential contacts.
The growing market for mergers, acquisitions and investment blossoming around the county’s tech sector is what had encouraged him transfer from a major UK law firm to the specialist Cheltenham legal practice, he said.
“I am excited by what a dynamic place Cheltenham is. It is an area that is absolutely ciritical and something the UK clearly excels in,” said Gastrell.
“It is great to see organisations like CyNam giving voice and championing some of the really exciting business and support systems we have in Gloucestershire.”
Max Wilkinson, the Liberal Democrat MP for Cheltenham, made he closing remarks at the event.
“It is important we recognise the significicance of cyber to Cheltenham. It is clear the community is already doing so much already and has grown so much. We want it to continue to do that and I intend to help support it all I can,” said Wilkinson.