Thames Valley

I'm your host, Faye.

Today, I'm joined by Jess, a participation officer from FCA Thames Valley, who's come to talk to us about the impact that care experience staff can have on children and young people in care today and how she uses her own experiences to make a real difference.

Jess, welcome.

Welcome.

Jerome? Yeah, well, I think you can have more than one derby.

So I do think that, you know, calling this the Thames Valley derby is okay.

And I think, you know, in terms of direct matchup, probably this is more significant to Oxford United than 89 other games that they might play against teams in the top four divisions.

You know, this isn't Wickham or Cheltenham or Northampton or any of the other kind of wannabe rivals.

It's actually pretty healthy, isn't it?

The other thing, and George is talking about fans of a certain vintage.

I lived through the Thames Valley Royals debacle when Reading fans scuppered it.

Roger Smee, who was a minor shareholder, was the person that foiled the whole Robert Maxwell planned nonsense.

There had been other visits by Epstein to Balmoral, including one when he was pictured with Maxwell on a shooting trip in 1999, and he had also visited Mr Mountbatten-Windsor at Windsor Castle.

The former prince was arrested in February by Thames Valley Police on suspicion of misconduct in public office.

Thames Valley was one of about nine police forces believed to be making inquiries about Mr Mountbatten-Windsor and Epstein, following information in the files released by the US Department of Justice.

Mr Mountbatten-Windsor has strongly denied all wrongdoing.

The company behind the latest Call of Duty video game says it will remove footage of a Halloween crowd crush in the South Korean capital Seoul in 2022, in which 159 people were killed.

There had been other visits by Epstein to Balmoral, including one when he was pictured with Maxwell on a shooting trip in 1999, and he had also visited Mr Mountbatten-Windsor at Windsor Castle.

The former prince was arrested in February by Thames Valley Police on suspicion of misconduct in public office.

Thames Valley was one of about nine police forces believed to be making inquiries about Mr Mountbatten-Windsor and Epstein, following information in the files released by the US Department of Justice.

Mr Mountbatten-Windsor has strongly denied all wrongdoing.

Hundreds of people have been evacuated from the Russian-occupied Ukrainian town of Oleshky, where they'd been living without electricity or running water.

You've got your Wessex, you've got your Staffords, you've got your Hertfordshire.

Thames Valley.

Thames Valley.

Lancashire.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

I mean, that's not a great advertisement for getting into it, is it? It's sort of one of those things that, you know, you kind of, in some ways, I guess we accidentally fell into.

So as a business, we started our work in the Thames Valley, kind of in the 90s and then...

We're working in Manchester and Birmingham where we had big master plans there.

And then obviously most people in the UK know us for the work we did at Kings Cross for the last 25 years.

you know, sorry, I shouldn't have said that.

And it was in the Thames Valley and it was in the floodplain of the Thames Valley.

And the client was talking about the garden lighting we were putting in and whether it was going to be safe or not.

And I said, I'm assuming that you're probably not going to want to use the lighting when the garden is underwater, right? Okay, let's get that clear.

Oh, interesting.

I'll tell you what.

I'll drive all the way down from West London down to the Thames Valley to have a look at this thing to see what's gone wrong, to see what I've done wrong.

And of course, when I get there and I grab hold of the cable of this little spiky light that's lighting up onto a rose bush or something, and I pull up, The box, the adaptable box, that's got the electrical connections inside it, that's got no seals on it at all.

It was established in a large and very old house, a great white building with very fine grounds about it.

There were large cedars in the garden, as there are in so many of the older gardens in the Thames Valley, and ancient elms in the three or four fields which we used for our games.

I think probably it was quite an attractive place, but boys seldom allow that their schools possess any tolerable features.

I came to the school in September, soon after the year 1870, and among the boys who arrived on the same day was one whom I took to, a Highland boy whom I will call MacLeod.

And the other thing is there's not been much movement of functions from ICBs to providers, despite the model ICB.

There's been a few like Medway ICB and Thames Valley ICB have managed to transfer some continuing health care assessments and stuff like that, and some medicines optimisation, but there's not been a huge amount of movement.

And a lot of that is because providers basically say they're not ready.

And when we think about the four that are coming, they also might be delayed.