Business & Technology
Care home named among UK best found to ‘require improvement’
Richmond Villages in Coral Springs Way was inspected by the Care Quality Commission (CQC), which was prompted by concerns raised about the facility.
The care home was found to ‘require improvement’ in safety, effectiveness, and leadership.
During the assessment one resident told the CQC: “Sometimes the staff will come in, turn off the buzzer and say they’ll be back in five minutes and sometimes you never see them again or you can wait up to an hour if they are very busy.”
The home, which provides nursing support for adults of all ages with dementia, nursing needs, and physical disabilities, was found to be in breach of regulations regarding good governance.
The CQC’s report, published in April 2025, highlighted issues with the logging of accidents and incidents, noting that learning and actions to prevent recurrence were not always implemented.
It also found that staff were not always documenting mental capacity assessment and Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards (DoLS) appropriately.
READ MORE: Thames Valley receives thousands for stalking victims
Care plans and risk assessments related to the health, safety, and welfare of service users were often inconsistent or missing altogether, according to the report.
Concerns were raised by residents and staff about response times to call bells and staffing levels, suggesting that support was not always provided when needed.
The entrance of Richmond Villages (Image: Google Maps)
However, the CQC did find that medicines were managed well and that staff were suitably employed and trained.
There was also a new home manager in place with plans to improve working relationships and ways of working.
The care home was inspected in January 2025 and, in the interim between the inspection and the report’s publication, Richmond Villages was named in the 2025 top 20 best mid-size care home groups in the UK by CareHome.co.uk.
READ MORE: Travellers warned of vaccine shortage for ‘nearly always fatal’ disease
The independent online guide ranks care homes across the country based on reviews submitted by residents, families, and friends of those in care.
At the time, Martin Crick, village manager at Richmond Villages Witney, said: “We are thrilled with the latest rating announcement from carehome.co.uk.
“The award is testament to the high-quality care provided to our residents.
“The reviews that make up our rating emphasise our person-centred care model, range of living options, wellness programmes, and experienced staff that contribute to our success.”
The care home was praised for its cleanliness and adherence to PPE guidelines.
Richmond Villages has been operating for more than 25 years and is part of Bupa.
In Witney, a range of care is provided, including dementia, nursing, and residential care, as well as specialised care for various conditions.
Richmond Villages has been approached for a comment.
Business & Technology
Atos finalises Premier League fixtures for 2026-27
Atos has compiled the 2026-27 Premier League fixture list, continuing a role it has held since the league’s launch in 1992.
The latest schedule extends a long-running arrangement under which Atos has supported the planning of 13,166 Premier League matches involving 51 clubs across 34 seasons.
Producing the fixture list begins at the start of the year and typically takes about six months. Computer systems generate an initial schedule, which specialists then revise against league rules and operational constraints.
Those rules limit long runs of home or away matches and aim to balance home and away games across any five-match sequence. Clubs are also not supposed to start or finish a season with two home games or two away games.
Beyond those rules, the schedule must account for local rivalries, policing capacity and transport pressures. Planning also seeks to reduce travel demands for supporters during periods such as Boxing Day and New Year’s Day.
Even small changes can affect a wider set of matches, requiring further adjustments elsewhere in the calendar. This year’s list also placed greater emphasis on player welfare and the need for recovery time between matches in an increasingly crowded football schedule.
Glenn Thompson, Fixture-List Compiler at Atos UK&I, has compiled the Premier League fixtures for more than 30 years. He said the work can narrow to a final manual review after the technology has processed large numbers of possible outcomes.
“There are pinch points in the process where it can become stressful, culminating in several days in a room manually checking for any issues that may have cropped up. The whole process is complex, involving many different data points. Ultimately, you can’t satisfy everyone, and it is a compromise across all clubs without favouring any one club,” Thompson said.
Sports work
Atos has maintained a Sports and Major Events division for more than 30 years. It also works with football bodies outside the Premier League, including UEFA’s national team competitions and CONMEBOL’s domestic club competitions in South America.
The group operates in 54 countries and employs about 56,000 people. It reported annual revenue of about EUR €7.2 billion at its go-forward perimeter.
Michael Herron, Head of Atos UK&I, linked the annual fixture release to the start of the new football season for supporters.
“For millions of fans, the release of the Premier League fixture list is when a new season really comes to life. We’re proud to support the Premier League and are looking forward to another exciting season ahead,” Herron said.
Business & Technology
Popular hi-fi and vinyl company closes Oxford branch
Established in 1972, Sevenoaks Sound and Vision is one of the largest independent Hi-Fi and Home Cinema retailers in the UK.
The company set up shop in Oxford on Banbury Road, but closed down recently.
Their website describes themselves as “a unique, first-class experience.”
Sevenoaks Sound and Vision invited music fans to experience its new state-of-the-art listening in 2024 (Image: Sevenoaks Sound and Vision)
“All of this is supported by a custom installation service which specialises in the creation and installation of bespoke home entertainment systems to suit all budgets.”
The company still has stores in Bristol, Bromley, Cambridge, Chelsea, Cheltenham, Epsom, Guildford, London, Leeds, Manchester, Norwich, Nottingham, Reading, Tunbridge Wells, Witham, and Yeovil.
They also have their flagship store in Seven Oaks, near Kent, and are opening a new store in Sutton Coldfield, near Birmingham.
Business & Technology
Everpure launches data intelligence for AI projects
Everpure has launched Everpure Data Intelligence, a product aimed at helping companies prepare enterprise data for artificial intelligence use.
The launch is part of a broader push by the storage and data management company to move customers towards what it calls a data-centric architecture, with governance and context applied directly to information at source rather than through separate applications.
Everpure Data Intelligence is the renamed business from 1touch, which Everpure acquired earlier this year. The software is designed to discover, classify and contextualise data across on-premises systems, public clouds, software-as-a-service applications and third-party storage.
It is intended to address a problem many businesses say is slowing AI projects: fragmented data spread across multiple systems, with inconsistent controls and limited visibility. Everpure cited research from IDC and its own study showing that 45% of businesses are looking to implement a unified data platform to consolidate fragmented data environments for AI work.
Data bottleneck
Everpure said many enterprise IT estates still rely on application-led structures, where data and its meaning remain tied to separate business systems such as finance, logistics or sales. It argues that this model leads to duplication, operational blind spots and a lack of trusted information for AI systems.
The new offering has three main functions: universal discovery across structured and unstructured data, automated governance to identify sensitive information and track lineage, and what Everpure describes as AI-ready context through a semantic knowledge graph that links raw data to business definitions.
Charles Giancarlo, Chairman and CEO of Everpure, outlined the company’s position on that shift. “AI completely upends the traditional IT hierarchy; enterprises that do not shift from app-centricity to data primacy will fall behind,” said Giancarlo. “Because data is a company’s primary asset, embedding context, semantics and governance directly at the data layer is the right way to reduce data fragmentation created by the growth of apps and AI agents. Enterprises need to consolidate their fragmented enterprise data footprint into a real-time corpus of trusted intelligence.”
The software is available now. It works across data stored on the Everpure platform as well as external environments, reflecting the reality that many large businesses operate mixed estates rather than a single infrastructure stack.
Cloud and control
Alongside the launch, Everpure announced updates to its Enterprise Data Cloud architecture. These include changes to its Unified Data Plane and Intelligent Control Plane, intended to create a shared operating foundation across infrastructure and automate routine storage administration tasks.
One element is Evergreen//One Overdrive, a service due in the third quarter that is designed to provide temporary performance increases for on-premises storage during demand spikes of up to 25% above baseline, without requiring a permanent subscription change.
Other planned additions include workload rebalancing and mobility tools, natural-language workflow execution for storage administrators, enhanced cyber anomaly detection based on telemetry across the wider environment, and compliance monitoring intended to identify configuration drift.
Industry analysts have increasingly focused on data quality and governance as barriers to AI deployment, even as spending on chips and models continues to dominate headlines. Matt Kimball, VP and Principal Analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, said many businesses are investing heavily in AI systems without resolving the underlying data issues.
“Enterprises are spending millions on advanced AI models and compute, but their underlying infrastructure is starving those systems with disconnected data,” said Kimball. “The biggest bottleneck to AI adoption right now isn’t the software, it’s the plumbing. Putting data at the absolute center of the enterprise strategy is exactly how IT leaders can rein in runaway operational costs and accelerate rollouts.”
Wider strategy
The announcement also reflects a wider effort by Everpure to move beyond storage hardware and position itself more firmly around data management, governance and automation. By embedding data discovery and policy controls into infrastructure workflows, the company is seeking to present a more integrated alternative to point tools used for classification, compliance and operational oversight.
For customers, the practical test will be whether the software can reduce the manual work involved in finding business-critical data, applying controls to sensitive records and making information usable for AI tools without broad replication across systems. Those issues have become more pressing as companies experiment with AI agents that need access to current, reliable enterprise data.
Everpure said the wider architecture is intended to show where data sits, how it connects and what it means across the estate, with governance rules attached to the data itself rather than enforced only through the application layer.
-
Crime & Safety4 weeks agoRyan Bridge speaks of London arrest after Oxford incident
-
UK News4 weeks agoRussian threats against Baltics ‘unacceptable’ and danger to ‘our entire union’, EU’s von der Leyen says – Europe live | Europe
-
Oxford News3 weeks agoOxfordshire families invited to free day of fun in Bicester
-
Crime & Safety4 weeks agoNew video call system to help domestic abuse victims
-
Crime & Safety3 weeks agoPhotos as 1979 Pontiac Firebird ‘bursts in flames’ at Tesco
-
Business & Technology3 weeks agoNew ‘high-quality’ mushroom business launched in Oxford
-
Oxford News4 weeks agoOxfordshire Lib Dems lose another councillor amid ‘serious concerns’
-
Business & Technology3 weeks agoNHS IT outages disrupt 274,620 patient interactions
