The Times - UK (2020-10-17)

the times | Saturday October 17 2020 2GM 37

News

A young barrister who broke a hotel

receptionist’s jaw with a hockey stick

has avoided being disbarred after it was

judged that he had “put his life in order”.

Felix Evans, 29, was told by a disci-

plinary tribunal that he would be fined

£2,000 and have to pay legal costs but

that he could practise at the Bar after a

three-year suspension despite the trial

judge having forecast that his career

was “utterly lost”.

Evans pleaded guilty two years ago to

causing grievous bodily harm after

prosecutors said that he struck his

“hapless” victim three times during the

assault.

The attack occurred in 2017 when

Evans was staying at a hotel after

playing hockey. He had been drinking

heavily with a friend. A ruling by

company, Petfre, based in Gibraltar, for

£2 million, which includes the interest

he would have earned from the win.

He said the past 2½ years had felt “like

hell... Hopefully the judge will accept

the arguments put forward by my legal

team.” Mr Green is in ill health and has

suffered a heart attack since the dispute.

Betfred points to 49 pages of terms

and conditions which Mr Green agreed

to when he signed up, including a clause

that all “pays and plays” would be void

in the event of a “malfunction”.

Mr Green’s solicitor, Peter Coyle, said

that Betfred had failed to prove there

was a software problem.

A Betfred spokesman said: “The case

is progressing at court and it is inappro-

priate for us to comment further.”

Gambler denied £1.7m

jackpot goes to court

Andrew Ellson

Consumer Affairs Correspondent

Barrister in assault by hockey stick

the Bar Tribunals and Adjudication

Service described the assault as

“particularly egregious”. It said that

Evans “hit the hotel receptionist with a

hockey stick three times: once in the

face, breaking his jaw, and twice on his

back”.

It went on to note that Evans told the

police after being arrested: “I’m very

guilty for what I did. I’m upset I harmed

him and shaken by what I’ve done. I

regret it.”

Suspending him from the Bar for

three years and fining him £2,000, the

panel said that ordinarily a criminal

conviction of this sort would result

in him being struck off. “Were it not

for the efforts [he] has made to put

his life in order we would not have

hesitated to disbar him,” the panel said.

“However, we do consider all that

he has done since the incident to

repair his life to amount to exceptional

circumstances.”

The trial judge said that Evans had

high academic achievements but that

his behaviour had been completely

unforgivable and that he should be

“thoroughly ashamed of himself”.

Evans was called to the Bar in 2014 at

Inner Temple. However, he is described

as an “unregistered” barrister because

he has not completed pupillage and

therefore is not yet entitled to practise.

The five-strong panel accepted that

Evans, a married father of one, had

attempted to redeem himself. He had

acknowledged that he was an alcoholic

and had attended counselling.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority

has allowed Evans to qualify into that

branch of the legal profession and the

tribunal noted that the firm employing

him was aware of his conviction.

Jonathan Ames Legal Editor

A father who was denied a £1.7 million

payout by Betfred is taking his case to

the High Court.

Andy Green, 53, from Lincolnshire,

claims that he hit the jackpot in 2018

playing a game on his phone. He spent

£2,500 celebrating but a Betfred direct-

or called him to say that there had been

a “software error” and it was rejecting

the claim. As a “goodwill” gesture the

company offered him £30,000 if the

father of two signed a confidentiality

agreement. When he refused Betfred

increased its offer to £60,000, which he

also rejected. He is heading to the High

Court to sue Betfred and its parent

future where no farmer goes in their

field, but I do want to see technology to

help them to do their job better,” he said.

A Southampton-based start-up,

Small Robot Company, has three types

of robots they lease out to 32 farms

across the UK. Called Tom, Dick and

Harry, they “seed, feed and weed” crops

autonomously for clients including

Waitrose and the National Trust. Their

biggest robot, Dick, which is shaped like

a spider and can grow in size according

to the crop size, zaps weeds with electri-

city rather than chemicals. The robots

rely on an artificial intelligence system

called Wilma that studies images

scanned by the robot Tom to work out

what help crops may need.

Dogtooth Technologies, a start-up

company near Cambridge, has devel-

oped autonomous robots to drive along

crop rows and assess whether each

Rise of robots down on the farm

From driverless tractors

to health monitors for

cows, technology is fast

changing agriculture,

writes Tom Knowles

Tom, Dick

and Harry

The largest of a fleet of

three robots, Dick zaps

weeds with electricity,

burning away the whole

root, rather than relying

on chemical sprays

Dogtooth

Technologies

The robot’s cameras scan

soft fruit to judge when

they are ready to be picked.

It checks for defects then

pops the strawberries

in punnets

strawberry is ready

to be picked.

Even after har-

vest, robots are in-

volved. The start-

up Crover has

produced a robot

that can “swim”

through bulk sol-

ids, such as cereals

and grains, moni-

toring their con-

dition in storage,

checking every

grain.

Innovation is

also coming to

livestock farm-

ing. David

Christensen, a farmer at Kingston Hill

Farm in Abingdon near Oxford, has

installed a monitor system called Cow

Manager for his 900-strong dairy herd.

A monitor, an ear tag with an inbuilt

accelerometer, can tell his team how

much the cow is walking, lying down,

eating and whether it has a tempera-

ture. Mr Christensen said: “It might say

she’s not eating too much, she’s lying

down for longer or she’s not ruminating

as much. It will say, you might just want

to have a look at cow 523, because she

has exhibited differ-

ent behaviour

from the previ-

ous seven

days.”

However,

David Rose, a

professor in

agricultural

innovation at

Reading Uni-

versity, said the

sector would

need to be careful

it does not simply

bring new stress-

es. “A farmer now

has a computer

spitting out so

much data on each

individual cow that

he has to sift

through it and learn new skills to try

and repurpose it. So actually it’s not

freed his time and it’s a different type of

stress,” he said.

“Instead of blind optimism, we need

to identify where benefits and dis-

advantages of new agricultural techno-

logy will occur and for whom.”

tKingstonHill

fr

o

d

D

p

a

in

R

v

se

n

it

b

e

h

sp

m

in

h

hitandlear

Agri-tech machines are helping to

seed, feed and weed crops — and even

pick strawberries. David Christensen’s

cows have monitors to tell him if they

are falling ill

To your right, an unmanned tractor

trundles intelligently by. On your left is

a herd of cattle wearing Fitbit-style

monitors. Above, a swarm of drones is

analysing your crops from the air.

This may be your field but there is no

real need for you to be there. It is a farm

of the future. Experts believe that with-

in a few years it could be a reality.

With the industry facing issues in-

cluding an ageing workforce, environ-

mental regulations on pesticides and

Covid-19, start-ups are seeking big

yields from “agri-tech”. The burgeoning

sector received an estimated $2.8 bil-

lion of investment worldwide last year.

Even the world’s largest tech giants

are seeing an opportunity. This week

Google announced the launch of an

agricultural unit called Mineral that

includes self-driving robot buggies that

monitor the health of individual plants.

“Farming is going to go through a

revolution, for sure,” Fraser Black, chief

executive of a British agri-tech centre,

Crop Health and Protection, said.

“We’re talking about Agriculture 4.0.

You’ve still got the classic farming

family for generations but now you're

also getting new entrepreneurs coming

in who are not farmers and know how

to use the technology differently and

the two are coming together.”

Kit Franklin, a lecturer in agricultur-

al engineering at Harper Adams Uni-

versity, helped to lead a project called

“hands-free hectare” in which a team

successfully planted, grew and harvest-

ed spring barley and winter wheat with-

out stepping on to the land. Instead

they relied on self-driving tractors and

combine harvesters, drones and a

ground-roving robot looking at weeds.

“My belief is in five years’ time it will

be unsurprising to see an autonomous

tractor,” Mr Franklin said. His team is

now using autonomous machines

across five fields, but with human inter-

action as well. “I don’t want to see a

How The Times

reported on the

launch of Mineral

on Wednesday