From: Greg Hands MP news@greghands.

com
Subject: News Bulletin from Greg Hands MP #473
Date: 31 January 2017 at 12:22
To: news@greghands.com

Issue 473 -Tuesday 31st January 2017

In this edition:

Since the last edition, Greg:

Greg Hands MPs Diary

Website of the Week:
Chelsea Football Club

Held a roundtable with local Chelsea and Fulham residents

concerned about the recently approved redevelopment of
Stamford Bridge Stadium, with special thanks to the Imperial
on the Kings Road for hosting!
Toured with Sir Terry Morgan, Chairman of Crossrail, the new
Crossrail station at Tottenham Court Road. The main sections
of Crossrail, or the Elizabeth Line, will open in 2018, and will
profoundly impact public transport in London.
As Minister of State for International Trade, Greg visited the
USA for a three-day export and investment promotion visit in
Seattle and San Diego. Greg met with around 30 companies,
both UK exporters and US investors, including Amazon,
Boeing, and Starbucks.
Hosted a round-table for the energy industry in London,
through the Energy Industries Council, the EIC.
Visited Stockholm and Linkoping in Sweden, as Minister of
State, for a two-day trade visit, including meetings with Saab,
Qinetiq, and the Swedish Minister for Trade and EU Affairs.
Addressed the Isle of Wight Conservatives at their
Association dinner in Ryde, Isle of Wight, kindly hosted by
Ryde School.
Was interviewed by the San Diego Union Tribune newspaper
on the UKs important life sciences sector and its exports to the
United States.
Welcomed Spains Counsellor for Agriculture, Snr GonzalezQuevado to the Department for International Trade.
Visited innovative life sciences company Horizon Discovery in
Cambridge.
Held his constituency surgery at Metro Bank in Chelsea,
kindly hosted by MetroBank. To request an appointment,
please send an email to handsg@parliament.uk, or call 020
7219 5448.

Photo news:
Crossrail
Greg Hands meets Local
Residents concerned about
new Stadium
Photo news:
Biocomm interview in San
Diego
Greg Hands MP welcomes
lowest unemployment in
over 10 years
Photo news:
Hands visits Starbucks
Seattle roastery
Greg Hands MP welcomes
new modern Industrial
Strategy which will support
business growth and create
more high-skilled, highlypaid jobs for London
Photo news:
Hands meets with Swedish
Opposition Leader
Hands in the papers:
U.K. tech envoy eases
Seattle tech leaders fears
about Brexit, free trade
Photo news:
UK's San Diego Trade
Team
Hands in the papers:
Britain deepens trade
relations with San Diego,
US
Photo news:
Isle of Wight

Hands in the papers:

International Trade Minister
Greg Hands visits fastgrowing Cambridge life
sciences company
Photo news:
Hands interviewed by
Sweden's Dagens Industri
newspaper
Photo news:
Hands meets with
Cambridgeshire businesses
7 ways to contact
Greg Hands

Website of the Week:

www.chelseafc.com
The website of Chelsea Football Club, where details of their new
60,000 all-seater stadium can be found.

Photo news:

Crossrail

Greg Hands MP with Crossrail Chairman Sir Terry Morgan at the

new Tottenham Court Road Crossrail station earlier this month.

Greg Hands meets Local Residents

concerned about new Stadium

On Friday, 27 January, Member of Parliament for Chelsea & Fulham,

Greg Hands, held a meeting with constituents concerned about
Chelsea Football Clubs new stadium, which has recently been
approved by Hammersmith & Fulham Council.
In the wake of the Councils planning approval, residents from both
Chelsea and Fulham have contacted their local Member of Parliament,
Greg Hands, to express their concerns at Chelsea Football Clubs
proposals to redevelop and expand its Stamford Bridge site to build a
new 60,000-seater stadium.
Dissatisfied with the outcome of Hammersmith & Fulham Councils
recent planning meeting, residents from the Billings, Stamford
Cottages, Hilary Close, and Chelsea Studios came together to discuss
their concerns and how best to proceed. Among the issues discussed
were the proximity of a proposed walkway; subsidence; dust and
pollution; security and safety; traffic and parking; and interference on
television and mobile phone signals. The residents repeatedly referred
to the need for ongoing communication, representation, and
consideration from Chelsea Football Club and the local Council.
Speaking after the meeting, local Member of Parliament for Chelsea &
Fulham, Greg Hands said: I have always supported Chelsea Football
Club being in my constituency, and that effectively means staying on
their current, 110 year historic site. However, it is essential that the
Club and the Councils listen to local residents as the new stadium
plans are taken forward.
It was useful to be able to offer my help to constituents on Friday, as
we met to discuss their concerns about the new stadium, and how I
might be able to contribute to mitigating the impact of this vast project
on their lives.
I had already written to the Leader of the Council on this subject
before the meeting, asking him how he plans to make good on his
assurances to local residents as well as fulfilling the more than 80
planning conditions imposed by the Council while delivering
protections and benefits for the area. I await his response.
Chelsea Football Clubs statement on its planning approval can be
found here, and more information can be found on the Councils
website.

Photo news:

Biocomm interview in San Diego

Greg Hands being interviewed in San Diego at a "Fire Side Chat"

hosted by Biocomm.

Greg Hands MP welcomes lowest

unemployment in over 10 years

Member of Parliament for Chelsea & Fulham, Greg Hands, has

welcomed the news that unemployment across the UK remains at the
lowest rate for over a decade down nearly 900,000 since 2010
according to the latest labour market figures, with 724,000 more
people back in work in London since 2010.
In Chelsea & Fulham, the number of people claiming the key out of
work benefits has fallen by 839 a 44 per cent drop since 2010.
Todays figures also showed that the employment rate amongst
women is now at record levels, there are over 500,000 more disabled
people in work over the past three years, and the number of young
people unemployed is now at the lowest level in over 12 years.
Member of Parliament for Chelsea & Fulham, Greg Hands, said: We
start the New Year with another encouraging set of figures, which
show the strength of our economy as we step up to the challenges of
2017.
Since the Conservatives entered government, the number of people
in Chelsea & Fulham relying on the key out of work benefits has fallen
by 839 a 44 per cent drop while the unemployment level
nationwide is at the lowest rate in over 10 years.
With a record high employment rate for women and over half a million
more disabled people in work over the last three years, we have made
real progress creating a strong economy and we will continue that
work as we build a country that works for everyone with more people
sharing in our countrys prosperity.

Photo news:

Hands visits Starbucks Seattle roastery

Greg Hands MP at Starbucks Seattle roastery last week.

Starbucks is a major investor in the U.K.

Greg Hands MP welcomes new modern

Industrial Strategy which will support
business growth and create more highskilled, highly-paid jobs for London

Member of Parliament for Chelsea & Fulham, Greg Hands, has

welcomed a green paper on a new modern Industrial Strategy which
will support businesses in London to grow and create more high
skilled, high paid jobs for local people.
The Industrial Strategy will ensure that everyone in London can
benefit from success through ten pillars including investing in
science, research and innovation, and upgrading infrastructure that
underpin a new approach and will identify all of the new opportunities
across our economy. This strategy will create the conditions where the
winners can emerge and grow in different types of business across
London.
The modern Industrial Strategy will benefit London and the South East
and proposes:

Making Britain a global leader in free trade, so companies

such as Google and Facebook continue to invest in our great
capital city.
Growing our strengths in particular sectors and technologies,
such as 5G mobile network technology in the South East of
England.
Cultivating our world-leading sectors, such as Londons
creative industry, by considering how we can use and develop
new technology, capitalise on intellectual property rights, and
grow talent pipelines.
Supporting key road investments, including the Lower
Thames Crossing, where the Government will consider the
findings of the consultation and take a decision on the
location, route and type of crossing in due course.
Improving connections for people and businesses through
major infrastructure projects, for example through plans for
better road and rail connections through the Oxford-Milton
Keynes-Cambridge corridor.
Making Britain a global leader in free trade, so that
businesses in and around the South East can continue to
invest and grow.

Commenting, Member of Parliament for Chelsea & Fulham, Greg

Hands, said: This is an important step in building a modern, dynamic
Industrial Strategy that will deliver more high skilled, high wage jobs
and improve living standards and drive economic growth across
London and the South East.
Local businesses and workers have the chance to contribute to this
vision and submit their views to help us create a high-skilled economy
in London where businesses can grow and more jobs are created.
This strategy will ensure we are backing are business in London and
the South East and ensure more people share in the benefits of its
success.

Photo news:

Hands meets with Swedish Opposition

Leader

Greg Hands with Swedish Opposition Leader Anna Kinberg Batra

in Stockholm last week.

Hands in the papers:

U.K. tech envoy eases Seattle tech leaders

fears about Brexit, free trade
ngel Gonzlez and Matt Day, Seattle Times
Wednesday 25th January 2017

Greg Hands, minister of international trade, United Kingdom,

opposes protectionism. (Dan Rutstein)
The United Kingdoms international
trade minister on Wednesday
sought to reassure the Seattle
technology community that even as Britain prepares to leave the
European Union it remains a steadfast champion of free commerce
and a strategic locale for U.S. tech titans.
Speaking to a roundtable of tech entrepreneurs at the headquarters of
prominent venture-capital firm Madrona Venture Group, Greg Hands
said that it would be a disaster to go back to protectionism, and that
the U.K. positioned itself as the biggest advocate of global free trade.
The comments come amid widening concern about the state of the
liberal world order, a worry especially relevant in Washington state,
where corporate giants have built empires on the relatively free flow of
goods, money and, to a lesser extent, people across the globe.
Economic stagnation in many parts of the developed world helped
erode the consensus on globalization that became dominant after the
fall of the Soviet bloc, and has given rise to populist and nationalist
movements.
Hands also spoke before a meeting Friday between U.K. Prime
Minister Theresa May and President Trump, who put the White House
on a platform highly skeptical of globalization. Earlier this week, Trump
moved to withdraw the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and
he has designs to redraw the North American Free Trade Agreement
with Canada and Mexico.
The leaders are expected to sow the seeds of a trade deal that could
give the U.K. an important tether as it negotiates its way out of the
European Union.
The American-born Hands has an interesting role in the environment
the U.K. has found itself in since the British voted last year to leave
the EU: that of crafting trade deals with other powers, a task that for
decades was in the hands of Brussels. He said that the recovery of
that sovereignty would make the U.K. even more open to the rest of
the world.
For many U.S. companies, however, the U.K. has long served as a
familiar, well-situated beachhead into the much larger European
market, from where they can quickly deploy executives, products and
financial transactions. The so-called Brexit poses plenty of
uncertainties to these multinational firms, particularly around
regulatory issues and the mobility of their personnel.
Hands, who also met on Wednesday with top brass at Amazon.com,
Starbucks and Boeing, said the U.K. would seek to remain on good
terms with the EU and maintain maximum access to the European
market after its departure.
He also said the U.K. expected to reach an agreement quickly to
guarantee the status of the 3 million EU nationals residing in Britain,
as well as the 2 million British citizens living on the Continent.
Madrona partner Hope Cochran said Hands visit shows that the U.K.
is working hard to pave the way forward by opening direct lines of
communication to the international business community.
There are still a lot of questions to work through, but Hands
department is approaching them with openness, Cochran said. The
U.K. has historically been a great jumping-off point for U.S.
companies expanding into Europe and the minister communicated
that he intends to keep it that way.
Hands pro-free trade comments should address some of the concerns
illustrated by a recent online presentation by Owen Larter, a manager
in Microsofts U.K. government-affairs team, in which he said that new
import taxes could cause the company to pull back on its investments
in data centers in the country.
Large tariffs on servers, many of which are assembled in China and
the Eastern Europe, might change our investment decisions and
perhaps we build out our data centers across other European
countries, he said in the presentation, spotted by the TechRepublic
news site and since taken offline.
Larter also said Microsoft was pushing to make it easier to bring
workers into the U.K., and was concerned that a break between the
U.K. and EU could mean more complicated rules for data privacy.
Microsoft subsequently issued a statement reaffirming its commitment
to its growing U.K. data-center footprint, saying Larters comments
were not reflective of the companys views.
Hands said he supported free flow of data across borders with
safeguards for privacy.
Britain will be bound by the coming EU data-privacy regime, called the
General Data Protection Regulation, from the time those rules phase
in next year until the split London negotiates with Brussels.
Speaking generally about the new U.K. approach to regulation
compared with the EU, Hands said he would be very surprised if we
went off wholesale in a different direction.

Photo news:

UK's San Diego Trade Team

Greg Hands MP with the UK's San Diego trade team.

Hands in the papers:

Britain deepens trade relations with San

Diego, US

Click on the image above to watch the Union-Tribune's video.

Bradley J Fikes, The San Diego Union-Tribune
Wednesday 25th January 2017
Underscoring the United Kingdoms
growing interest in San Diegos
large life science community, the UK Minister of State for Trade and
Investment toured the area this week.
Among his stops, Minister Greg Hands:
Took part in a fireside chat with members of Biocom, the
California life science trade group based in San Diego.
Visited Human Longevity, a company seeking to combine all
known medical information to improve the healthy lifespan of
humanity.
Toured the Carlsbad office of Thermo Fisher Scientific, a huge
biomedical products and research took company.
Hands stopped by the Union-Tribune Monday evening to discuss why
Britain is so interested in San Diego, the site of a new trade office that
opened in October.
What Britain seeks, he said, is access to the growing biotech and life
science community in San Diego, which has worldwide influence
through companies such as DNA sequencing giant Illumina.
What Britain offers is access to top scientific talent, including four of
the top 10 universities in the world, Hands said. They are University of
Cambridge, Imperial College London, University of Oxford and
University College London.
Not only San Diego, but all of California is extremely important to the
UK, Hands said.
The UK is the second-largest investor in California and life science
is a really important overall part of the trade picture.
Nationwide, the UK is the largest foreign investor.
In 2014, the British government announced plans to sequence the
genomes of 100,000 Britons, using Illuminas sequencing instruments.
More trade opportunities may arise with the administration of
President Donald Trump, he said.
Our prime minister, Theresa May, is coming on Friday to meet the
new president, and were looking forward to seeing what results come
from that, Hands said. Theres been a lot of talk about a future free
trade agreement between the UK and the United States, so its quite
an exciting time to be in the trade space between the U.S. and the
UK.
The Trump administration has said it hopes to strengthen the special
relationship between the two countries. With Brexit, the impending
departure of Britain from the European Union, they will need to
negotiate a new trade agreement.
Joe Panetta, Biocoms president and CEO, said Hands emphasized
that Britains interest in the American life science industry will not be
disrupted by Brexit.
He made a point of telling me that the new UK government office in
San Diego has a dedicated focus on the life science industry, with
terrific staff on call to deepen relationships with life science companies
here, Panetta said.
The regulatory environment, including any necessary changes within
current UK regulatory agencies, will be carefully crafted, and closely
patterned after the current EU agencies, making it as easy as
possible to work with both agencies, Panetta said.
Minister Hands understands that U.S. companies will have to create
two sets of documents for submission to have a product approved in
both the UK and the EU, and will work hard to address that potential
obstacle.

Photo news:

Isle of Wight

Greg Hands with Isle of Wight MP Andrew Turner in Ryde, Isle of

Wight, last week, where Greg was guest speaker at the Isle of
Wight Conservatives.

Hands in the papers:

International Trade Minister Greg Hands

visits fast-growing Cambridge life sciences
company
Cambridge Network
Monday 16th January 2017
Horizon Discovery Group, world
leader in the application of gene
editing technologies, last week
hosted International Trade Minister
Greg Hands at its facility in
Cambridge.
During the visit on Friday, Mr Hands learned more about the
companys groundbreaking work to design and engineer gene-edited
cell lines and was given a tour of the Horizon headquarters, including
state-of-the-art research laboratories and manufacturing facilities.
Horizon Discovery was recently tipped as a company to watch in
2017 by both the Financial Times and Sunday Times, and has
recently achieved success achieved in key branches of its commercial
operations, including:
In December, the company announced the signature of more
than 1million of new service agreements in FY 2016 for its
Genetic Screening Programme, with revenue to be recognised
in Q4 2016 and early 2017.
The 2016 revenue for Horizons Genetic Screening platform
represents a near fourfold increase since the launch of the
platform in 2015.
Horizons Cell Bank subscription programme has generated
over 700,000 in revenue since its launch in Q3 2016.
Horizons Biomanufacturing business has seen a significant
growth in cell line licensing revenue, to over 1.3million in
2016, over three times that of 2015. Product evaluations with
pharmaceutical,
biotech
and
contract
manufacturing
organisations around the world are now resulting in several
high margin licensing deals being signed and establishing a
strong pipeline for 2017.
Dr Darrin Disley, Chief Executive Officer, Horizon Discovery,
commented: We were delighted to welcome the Minister to Horizon
Discovery. We have an established relationship with the Department
for International Trade, having previously participated in an oncology
trade mission to India which opened up a new network of potential
partners, and recently received important introductions to new
contacts in the US. We look forward to working closely with the
Department as we look towards our exciting year ahead.
International Trade Minister Greg Hands said: Cambridge is world
renowned for its capabilities in a number of sectors, and has the
largest UK cluster of scientific research and development employment
outside London. Fast-growing and pioneering companies like Horizon
typify the vibrancy and strength of the life sciences sector in
Cambridge.
Meeting businesses like Horizon, who are at the cutting edge of
global advances, is a pertinent reminder of the international demand
for British goods, services and expertise. My department is committed
to providing the support businesses need to help them continue to
grow and achieve their ambitions.
During his visit to Cambridge, the Minister also met the Greater
Cambridge Greater Peterborough Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP)
to hear about the strengths of the local economy and discuss how
Government can support increased growth. He also, along with Lucy
Frazer MP for South East Cambridgeshire, attended a roundtable
lunch hosted by the Cambridgeshire Chamber of Commerce and
attended by key businesses including Lloyds Bank, JDR Cable
Systems Ltd, Cellbond and Eve Taylor.
Greater Cambridge Greater Peterborough is currently home to 1.3
million people, 700,000 jobs and 63,000 enterprises generating 33
billion per annum, making it the 13th largest economy out of the 39
LEP areas.

Photo news:

Hands interviewed by Sweden's Dagens

Industri newspaper

Greg Hands being interviewed by Sweden's Dagens Industri

newspaper.

Photo news:

Hands meets with Cambridgeshire

businesses

Greg Hands MP with Cambridgeshire businesses discussing

trade options earlier this month.

7 ways to contact Greg Hands MP:

By Phone:
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By post:
In person:

020 7219 5448

mail@greghands.com
Greg Hands MP
House of Commons
London SW1A 0AA
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