The Queen’s Speech indicates the government’s programme for the coming year. It neither commits the government to any of the bills nor restricts the introduction of other legislation - such as a bill to scrap all or part of the Northern Ireland Protocol.
Commentators have widely suggested that the speech was thin on content. However, the proof will be in the bills when published.
HM Revenue and Customs have announced that the Customs Declaration Service (CDS) will replace the Customs Handling of Import and Export Freight (CHIEF) system from 31 March 2023. Services on CHIEF will be withdrawn in two stages:
After 30 September 2022 the ability to make import declarations on CHIEF will end and you must move all your import declarations to CDS
According to The Office of National Statistics (ONS) an estimated 149.3 million working days were lost because of sickness or injury in the UK in 2021. This is equivalent to 4.6 days per worker, which as you can imagine has a huge impact on businesses.
The Government has opened phase 2 of the Industrial Energy Transformation Fund (IETF) for bids for grants totalling £70 million and it runs until 9th September.
Last month, CECIMO (the European group for associations representing machine tool manufacturers) and the European cluster collaboration platform co-organised a conference entitled "Engineering - Automation - Machinery: Exploring collaboration opportunities with Ukraine". The event provided insights into the current situation in relation to the Ukrainian industries.
During the event, they received requests in the following areas:
CECIMO have kindly sent us an update on four funding opportunities that are approaching the deadline at the end of this month. Below you can find the funding calls in the areas of digital technologies, robotics, etc., applied to the machine tool/manufacturing sector with all the necessary information about the opening date, the deadline, the budget, the short overview and the link to each open call.
The open calls are:
The business department, BEIS is running two business training webinars designed to raise awareness the brand new PAS 7050 ‘Bringing safe goods to market’ and the updated PAS 7100 ‘Supporting Better Product Recalls’.
To register for the training event and secure your place, click on the links below:
18th May 09:30 – 11:30
The MTA are pleased to report that exhibitors and visitors are now attending overseas trade shows to kick start their export. The MTA and EIA have therefore decided to look at the most successful shows in our sector that are approaching the deadline for applications, to ascertain whether members would like to attend these once again, as part of a UK group.
METALEX
16 – 19 November 2022
Bangkok, Thailand
European Commission Economic Sentiment Indicator, Capacity Utilisation and Investment Survey, April 2022: The European Commission (EC) draws from a range of surveys to construct confidence indicators for six sectors of the economy and then uses five of these (financial services is not used) make up its Economic Sentiment Indicator (ESI). The other point to note is that although labelled as “April 2022” or “Q2-2022”, the data collection period was mainly in April so the data really refers...
The Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) voted 6-3 to increase interest rates by 25 points to 1.0%. This was not unexpected and it is worth noting that the 3 dissenters actually wanted an even larger increase of 50 basis points. The debate among economists generally is now two-fold; to what extent is raising interest rates effective in countering inflation that is driven largely by external factors and whether any further rate rises are likely.