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The South East has a Gross Value Added (GVA) of £158 billion (approx $290 billion / €230 billion). This is similar to that of Norway and Austria. |
With a population of eight million and a workforce of 4.2 million, the South East is the largest region in the UK. |
Approximately 287,200 VAT registered enterprises are present in the South East, more than any other UK region. |
The South East is the largest exporter in the UK, with £29 billion (approx $52 billion / €41 billion) of goods moved in 2004. |
The labour force is highly educated with 90% of the working age population holding an academic qualification and over one third of the workforce holding a degree. |
Workers with good language skills are readily available in the region due to the truly international workforce of 585,000 people who were born outside of the UK. |
Around nine working days a year are lost per employee due to sickness, the lowest amount for a UK region. |
The region is home to 24 universities and higher education institutes, where nearly 200,000 study. This includes the University of Oxford, one of the most prestigious universities in the world. |
South East universities work very closely with business, with over 2800 research conracts won annually, higher than any other UK region. |
The region's 24 universities and higher education institutes supply over 73,000 graduates per annum. |
£4.66 billion (approx $3.06 billion / €2.43 billion) is spent on R&D annually, nearly one quarter of UK expenditure. |
South East organisations undertaking R&D employ 45,800 people, which is almost 25% of the UK R&D workforce. |
The South East has the highest number of patents granted in the UK. The statistics show that 820 patents, over 20% of the UK total were granted to firms based in the South East in 2004-5. |
There are 6,540 foreign-owned companies in the South East. |
With three international airports, 11 sea ports, 108 motorway junctions, 77 train stations and access to the Channel Tunnel, the South East has one of the most extensive transport infrastructures in Europe. |
Heathrow, the world's busiest international passenger airport, is home to over 90 airlines serving approximately 186 destinations. It handles over 67 million passengers and 1.3 million tonnes of freight each year. |
It takes 35 minutes to travel through the Channel Tunnel between the UK and mainland Europe. Most major towns in the South East are connected by rail to central London with a journey time of under an hour. |
Almost one third of the land in the South East (637,000 hectares) is designated as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB), more than any other UK region. |
In 2004-5, the South East had the second lowest crime rate in England with 8,983 reported crimes per 100,000 people. |
94% of the South East population is in good or fairly good health, which is higher than any other UK region. |
Eurostar has set a record for the quickest train journey between Paris and London of just 2 hours, 3 minutes and 39 seconds, meaning a typical journey will take just over 2 hours when the line opens in November 2007. |
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| Oxford University launches new research projects |
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9 December 2009
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The University of Oxford has launched two new research projects that aim to tackle some of the biggest problems facing the global technology industry.
The world-renowned institution has authorised the commencement of the DIADEM and VERIWARE projects, which will attempt to extract better information from the internet and improve communication between computing devices respectively.
DIADEM, led by Professor George Gottlob, will seek to improve the extraction of complex structured information from large numbers of websites, which will have consequences for traditional web search engines.
Specifically, the project aims to develop software that can search websites of a particular field and order the information contained within them.
Professor Gottlob explained that this development would be a "major step forward in web search technology" - with companies such as Microsoft, Google and Yahoo already expressing interest in DIADEM's results.
He said: "It will boost individual and corporate web users' ability to get the information they need from the internet."
Comparatively, VERIWARE will aim to facilitate a new era of "ubiquitous computing", in which tiny computer systems will enter everyday objects surrounding us, including fridges and cars.
Dubbed 'everyware', this new type of technology will monitor their environment with electronic sensors and continuously interact with other devices surrounding it.
The University of Oxford's project will provide a rigorous method of ensuring that these embedded systems are working as they should.
Professor Marta Kwiatkowska of the University of Oxford's Computing Laboratory explained that the pace of technological change is "accelerating" beyond the capabilities of existing model-checking programmes.
She said: "We need a paradigm shift in software verification to let us deal with the challenges posed by complex communities of 'everyware'."
The University of Oxford was judged to have the largest quantity of world-leading research of any UK higher education provider in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise. 
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