LONDON: Britain’s Carillion collapsed on Monday after its banks lost faith in the construction and services company, throwing hundreds of major projects into doubt and forcing the government to step in to guarantee vital public services.
Carillion was forced into compulsory liquidation after costly contract delays and a slump in new business left it at the mercy of its lenders and battling a ballooning debt pile.
The demise of the 200-year-old business poses a major headache for Theresa May’s government which has employed Carillion to work on 450 projects including the building and maintenance of hospitals prisons, defense sites and the country’s new superfast rail line.
“In recent days we have been unable to secure the funding to support our business plan and it is therefore with the deepest regret that we have arrived at this decision,” Chairman Philip Green said.
“This is a very sad day for Carillion, for our colleagues, suppliers and customers that we have been proud to serve over many years.”
Employing 43,000 people around the world, including 20,000 in Britain, Carillion has been fighting for survival since July when it revealed it was losing cash on several projects and had written down the value of its contract book by £845 million.
With banks refusing to accept the group’s latest attempt to restructure, May’s senior ministers met around the clock in recent days, under pressure from the opposition Labour Party and unions not to use taxpayer money to prop up the failing company.
Carillion has debt and liabilities of £1.5 billion with creditors that include banks RBS, Santander UK, HSBC and others. It has a pension deficit, included within that figure, of £580 million.
David Lidington, the minister in charge of the Cabinet Office which oversees the running of government, said his first priority was to ensure that public services continued. He urged the company’s staff to continue to work and said the government would pay their salaries.
Some contracts handled by Carillion would go to alternative providers, he added.
The company’s collapse comes at a difficult time for the government as it negotiates its exit from the European Union.
“It is regrettable that Carillion has not been able to find suitable financing options with its lenders but taxpayers cannot be expected to bail out a private sector company,” Lidington said in a statement.
“For clarity, all employees should keep coming to work, you will continue to get paid. Staff that are engaged on public sector contracts still have important work to do.”
Labour’s business spokeswoman Rebecca Long-Bailey called for a full investigation as to why the government continued to award Carillion contracts when it was clear it was in trouble.
“This company issued three profit warnings in the last six months yet despite those profit warnings the government continued to award government contracts to this company,” she told BBC TV.
“We’re ... asking for a full investigation into the government conduct of this matter.”
Spun out of Tarmac nearly 20 years ago and having bought Alfred McAlpine in 2008, Carillion has worked on key construction projects including London’s Royal Opera House, the Suez Canal road tunnel and Toronto’s Union Station.
In July last year it won contracts to build Britain’s new High Speed 2 rail line, a major project that will better connect London with the north of England.
UK government steps in as Carillion forced into compulsory liquidation
UK government steps in as Carillion forced into compulsory liquidation
AI models could help to save lives, says experts at WGS
- With the rise of wearable health technology such as the Whoop and the Oura ring, people now have access to their own health data
DUBAI: AI language learning models could soon be used to give reliable medical advice, Director of the Stanford Center for Digital Health Dr. Eleni Linos told the World Governments Summit on Thursday.
“We will get to a point where the accuracy of these models results in people trusting them and using them even more,” she said.
Linos said that the models were currently “good enough” at offering quick guidance on how to react in situations and said they could be very helpful to parents, for example, if their child woke up in the middle of the night and needed immediate medical attention.
“I believe language learning models are equipped to answer these questions. They are definitely not perfect, but they are good enough. It can offer quick guidance into how we can react or respond to situations,” she said.
Linos said that AI language learning models could be crucial in saving lives and making quick decisions, not only in rural areas but in urban societies as well.
“Even in urban areas and for people with health insurance, getting access to doctors can take days or even months. Being able to get an answer within seconds is important, even if it’s not perfect and there is a risk that it’s not the same level as professional advice, it’s still something,” she said.
Co-founder and CEO of CREATE Medicines Daniel Getts said that data was a key element in monitoring the success of health technology.
CREATE Medicines is a clinical-stage biotechnology company based in Massachusetts that focuses on transforming how diseases are treated.
“The key element to success in monitoring health through this tech is data. Baseline data sets are going to be essential on how we apply tech ideas in relation to health,” Getts said.
He said that his company was approaching drug manufacturing and preventive medicine from a one-size-fits-all approach.
“We focus on making drugs that everyone can take, making a drug for one human doesn’t help humanity. We need drugs that are effective to every individual.”
With the rise of wearable health technology such as the Whoop and the Oura ring, people now have access to their own health data.
Linos said that these technologies monitored heart rate, sleep quality and even the food people consumed, and were changing the way people made health-conscious decisions.
“If you can imagine a world where you can call your doctor instantly, where you have the wisdom of traditional medicine passed on from generations, but that is somehow incorporated into available, tech-driven LLM that will give you not just instant, rigorous scientific advice, but that it’s informed by generations of wisdom and is available in moments … I think that would be an incredible vision for the future, where everyone in the world, regardless of where they live, what language they speak, can get the highest standard of medical advice, medical care, informed by science but also traditional wisdom at their fingertips,” she said.
Getts echoed this idea and said that the need to call a doctor was going to decrease in the future.
“Your need to call a doctor is going to become diminished over time because we’re going to empower people with education and access to therapies that are easier to administer and we can just understand how they work,” he said.
