The Virgin Media Park and Charge project (VPACH) will demonstrate at scale an innovative new approach to building on-street charging solutions for hard to address residential areas using the existing and widespread power and communications network assets of Virgin Media VPACH has an ambitious target of deploying and operating 1200 charge points. Key to providing the scale of this project will be a group of Local Authorities covering 11 local authority areas: they are committed to ensuring that site selection, parking and highways strategy, procurement processes, and street furniture requirements are aligned with the need of the communities to provide charging solutions which will encourage and enable the uptake of EV adoption. The scale of the project is supported by the scale of the existing infrastructure portfolio that Virgin Media has, which includes 170,000 km of ducts and 40,000 grid connections plus tens of thousands of additional cabinets. This will provide the cost-effective foundation upon which a variety of Charging Point Operators (CPOs) can install their open source, fully integrated, hardware and systems. This approach will help minimise new street furniture and benefit from access to a high-speed data communications network for charging apps and EV data offload alongside public Wi-Fi and IoT services such as pollution monitoring and parking management. This project will develop a demand led charging point request process to engage with existing and potential EV owners alongside geospatial planning and analysis to identify the most suitable locations overlaying forecast EV demand, grid constraints, infrastructure costs and Virgin Media's network coverage. The consortium is led by SMS plc in partnership with Virgin Media and is made up of key constituents of the residential charging value chain. Vattenfall Incharge and Chargepoint Services Ltd. are the charging point operators. The Local Authorities led by Phase 1 participants Oxfordshire County Council and West Midlands Combined Authority also now include Worcestershire County Council, Croydon, Southend, Northampton,Wandsworth and Liverpool councils. Technical, geo-spatial planning and grid flexibility expertise will be provided by Cenex, Loughborough University Transport Studies Institute and The UK Decentralised Energy Trading Association (DETA). Innovation in hardware and eMobility Services will be provided by Connected Kerb and GINGER. We are also delighted to welcome Robert Llewellyn's Fully Charged as our communications and events partner.

‘Collaborative and AdaPtive Integrated Transport Across Land and Sea’ (CAPITALS) is a 2 year project that brings together 15 organisations and stakeholders covering the land and sea logistics chain. The project will develop novel multi-modal transport solutions for seamless movement of freight and people across transport modes (sea, road and rail). The project specifically addresses congestion and delays around ports and their hinterlands resulting the growing numbers and sizes of vessels, lorries and rail wagons. As an island nation, with more than 95% of imports and exports going by sea, the UK economy is critically dependent on shipping and inland connections. Using pioneering techniques and advanced algorithms to exploit maritime, road, rail, local authority and other data, CAPITALS will develop user-centred applications and services to better synchronise shipping, vehicle and rail movements to achieve greater capacity and efficiency from existing infrastructure. CAPITALS solutions will initially be trialled in Liverpool and Humber to validate the benefits, and then define a roadmap for national and international scale-up.

Recent flooding has laid bare the vulnerability of urban areas and buildings. In the winter of 2013/14 there was an insured loss of over £1bn, with much more being spent by local authorities and government to recover and repair urban areas. The result is that property owners have found affordable insurance difficult to find, if they can be insured at all. In response BRE, AXA and Lexis Nexis have developed a pilot property flood resilience database (PFR-d) that provides a dataset for insurers to assess the impact of measure taken by property owners to address their flood risk. In the Urban Floods Resilience project the same team in association with Liverpool City Council will further develop the PFR-d to incorporate a PFR-score, to quantify the impact of the resilience measures. The data on the PFR-d will be uploaded by certified PFR-surveyors; thus it will involve the development of training and a certification scheme. The PFR-d will be further developed to integrate local authority flood risk data, water / flood infrastructure assets, community data and satellite data of previous flood events. The PFR-d will therefore become a way for urban areas to address and manage flood risk.