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Hampshire gets the show on the road
Nearly £13 million is to be spent upgrading motorways and A-roads in Hampshire, the transport secretary has announced.
Patrick McLoughlin said improvements on the M27, M3, A34 and A3 were part of a £217m national programme to remove bottlenecks and keep traffic moving.
He added that £12.8m being spent is expected to help create up 40,000 jobs between 2013 and 2015 and will also support the planned building of more than 23,000 new homes in the county by 2020.
Junction 3 and Junction 5 on the M27 will both see increased capacity by the widening of slip roads, creation of new lanes and installation of traffic
signals. Signage on the M3/A34 Junction 9 at Winchester will be improved. The A3 will have a segregated left turn lane created at the Ham Barn roundabout, Petersfield, which will also get an additional lane.
Improvements to Junction 6 of the M3 at Basingstoke include creating a lane to pass through the centre, widening on the A30 and improving lane signing and markings.
“Keeping traffic moving is vital to securing prosperity. By removing bottlenecks and improving access to local enterprise zones, key international trading ports and communities, these road schemes will help get people to and from work and power the economy,“ McLoughlin said.
Investment pays with record year for Blue Chip
IT specialist Blue Chip has announced another record year with a headline turnover of £19 million at its year-end 2011-12.
This has included considerable investment in its headquarters, cloud services, customer service programme, staff numbers and interactive website, all of which have contributed to higher customer retention and gain for overall growth.
In addition, on November 1, the company launched its examination suite – a Prometric and Pearson VUE test centre – at its Poole headquarters, where IT professionals across the south and south west seeking globally- recognised IT certifications can now sit their exams.
Managing director Richard Cook said: “This year we have invested in the region of half a million pounds to ensure a continuation of the growth and expansion we have experienced in recent years. This expenditure has underpinned the relaunch of our HQ, encompassing our own data centre for cloud-based
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IT, plus a new state-of-the-art training centre in addition to our newly-launched facility in Southampton. It has also seen our headcount increase by 24, to support new customer wins.
“We have made a significant investment in our cloud offerings, taking leased space in the C4L Bournemouth Data Centre and building an extensive computer platform to enable us to deliver Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and online backup to our customers as the first of many services which we will offer into the future.“
Another initiative is extension of full 24/7 technical support as standard for all support contract customers, regardless of size. The launch of the customer service programme and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to ensure service excellence throughout the entire business has also played a role in retention and new business wins.
Details:
www.bluechip.uk.com
THE BUSINESS MAGAZINE – SOLENT & SOUTH CENTRAL – NOVEMBER 2012
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