NRL’s recruitment business is celebrating after being recognised as one of the UK’s top providers for another year. The Largest Staffing Firms in the UK report is prepared following extensive research by specialists at Staffing Industry Analysts (SIA) to rank the top 50 performing recruitment businesses in the UK each year by stringently evaluating each organisations’ financial performance ...

Motorists heading towards Taunton’s M5 Junction 25 will be using a new road layout (see map below) from next week marking a big step forward in a major project to improve the junction. The £19m scheme to upgrade Junction 25 and increase capacity is progressing well and is due to complete in the summer. The scheme includes an important new link road serving the town and motorway. From Sunday n...

In just a few short weeks, Richard Huish College, in Taunton, has transformed its sports hall into an extensive COVID asymptomatic testing centre, initially to allow staff, and students taking exams in January to have a test and sit exams with added safety. Within the first week of operating they had carried out over 310 tests, including supporting Bishop Fox’s Community School staff and pupils...

Grants up to £2,500 are now available for smaller charities and grassroots groups based in Somerset. Somerset Community Foundation (SCF) manages The Somerset Fund and is encouraging smaller charities and community groups that run on less than £100,000 per year to apply now for funding. The grants are ‘unrestricted’, which means they can be used to pay for ongoing running costs, also known a...

Bridgwater & Taunton College (BTC) has been selected as one of the finalists for the City & Guilds Award for Colleges Engagement with Employers at the Association of Colleges (AOC) Beacon Awards 2020/21. The national awards celebrate and recognise the best and most innovative practice among UK further education (FE) colleges and the City & Guilds Award for Colleges Engagement with Emp...

Somerset Chamber members SASP (Somerset Activity and Sports Partnership) and Spark Somerset have joined forces to encourage people to become COVID Community Champions. The Covid Community Champions Network gives local people a role in helping their community to get up-to-date information and make choices to stay healthy. After attending a short online training course, COVID Community Champions w...

The former bosses of a leading grocery benchmarking programme in the UK and Ireland have announced the expansion of their own research group based in Somerset, creating several new jobs. Julia Pascu and Andy Kemp-King had been running the Advantage Report in the UK and Ireland for nearly 20 years under a franchise agreement with Advantage Group International (AGI), based in Canada. That agreeme...

Somerset-based small business Reflex Medical Limited has started 2021 with expansion! While the business landscape is so uncertain, Reflex Medical have gone from strength to strength despite the additional challenges imposed by COVID-19. Moving from a small storage space and office in Bruton, Reflex Medical has secured new premises near Cannards Grave in Shepton Mallet. This new location offers a...

Leading South West law firm Battens Solicitors has today announced the appointment of Patrick Mears as Head of Commercial Property, Bath. Renowned for his considerable expertise in commercial law, servicing the Bath market for many years, Patrick will help focus and build the firm’s commercial offering in Bath. Building on Battens’ reputation for excellence in commercial law, from its Yeovil ...

The British Chambers of Commerce’s Quarterly Economic Survey (QES) – the UK’s largest independent survey of business sentiment and a leading indicator of UK GDP growth – found that business conditions remained weak in the fourth quarter as the second lockdown squeezed activity.  The bellwether survey of 6,203 firms, who employ nearly a million people across the UK, revealed tha...

In the latest blog from Weston College, Joe Smith, the college's Business Partnership Manager, takes a closer look at making remote working work! The last nine months has seen remote working move from a trend to a requirement for many of us. Many leaders quickly transformed some if not all of their operations to virtual working in March, having had little time to prepare. This shift has presented...

The Chancellor has announced one-off top up grants for retail, hospitality and leisure businesses worth up to £9,000 per property in the wake of the third national lockdown. A £594 million discretionary fund will also made available to support other impacted businesses and comes in addition to £1.1 billion further discretionary grant funding for local authorities, Local Restriction Support Gra...

Commenting on the Prime Minister’s announcement of a new, national lockdown in England, BCC Director General Adam Marshall said:   “Businesses will understand why the Prime Minister has felt compelled to act on the spiralling threat to public health, but they will be baffled and disappointed by the fact that he did not announce additional support for affected businesses alon...

Otterhead Forest School leader Peter Holmes has raised £2,200 to support a forest school project with Reminiscence Learning. He had originally set out to raise £600 by camping out in all winds and weathers for one week as his old-fashioned alter ego ‘Tarquin Montgomery’. Tarquin’s Big Camp Out saw Peter and friend Harvey cooking on a campfire, sleeping in hammocks and tackling the worst ...

Aspen Waite Director, David Scheeres, has designed, developed and implemented a pioneering process which has received national recognition and praise for turning the huge amount of waste caused by the use of disposable surgical face masks into a useful product. Sterimelt technology, developed by David and colleagues, melts single-use polypropylene plastics with blocks later converted into new pro...