Contracts for Innovation: FOAK Programme 2025 – Personal Safety (UK)

Innovate UK and the Department for Transport (DfT) are collaborating with the rail industry to accelerate and increase the adoption of innovation to improve UK railways. This is through the DfT’s First of a Kind (FOAK) Programme.

The FOAK Programme addresses industry challenges by running innovation competitions. The competitions focus on collaboration with industry and deliver high maturity demonstrations, enabling efficient integration into the railway system. This competition aims to support innovative suppliers for market readiness.

Specific Themes

• The competition theme focuses on personal safety. They are seeking innovative solutions to identify, mitigate, and improve responses to personal safety incidents on the railway, ensuring a safer experience for all passengers.
• Feeling safe and secure on the railway is essential for travel. However, incidents such as trespassing, suicides, anti-social behaviour and violence are increasing across the network. These incidents not only cause delays for passengers but also create distress for everyone involved.
• In particular, existing research suggests that both the occurrence and fear of Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) can influence their travel choices. However, assessing VAWG incidents is challenging due to underreporting and underrepresentation in surveys and crime statistics.
• There is an urgent need for innovative solutions to identify safety incidents, mitigate their impact, and improve response measures.
• They encourage applicants to focus on innovative solutions which:
  • address prevention, through measures such as raising awareness and education, designing and providing safer infrastructure, predicting crime hotspots, and improving understanding of perpetrators, particularly in cases of VAWG
  • address the immediate response, through measures such as equipping staff with tools and training to handle incidents effectively, enhancing personal safety, and making intervention during incidents easier
  • address the post-incident reaction, through measures such as improving intelligence via feedback and reporting, supporting investigations by identifying perpetrators effectively and promptly, and providing evidence; additionally, offer support to survivors, particularly those affected by VAWG
  • detect trespass events and incidents occurring in the absence of a train, including those involving mobility impaired individuals and the challenges they face if they fall onto the tracks, particularly from motorised wheelchairs and scooters
  • can be trialled and evaluated in a live station environment to gather feedback from staff and customers
  • at a minimum of Rail Industry Readiness Level 5 and capable of delivering an immediate impact
  • can be trialled in a railway environment, with effectiveness measured to help operators better understand the problem
• They discourage applicants from focusing on solutions which:
  • are complex and difficult to operate
  • require high capital expenditure
  • require significant modifications or investments to train fleets and stations
  • cannot integrate into existing systems or processes
  • duplicate or fail to integrate with existing technologies and systems such as the British Transport Police’s Railway Guardian app

Research Categories

• Prototype development and evaluation
  • This can include prototyping, demonstrating, piloting, testing and validation of new or improved products, processes or services in environments representative of real-life operating conditions. The primary objective is to make further technical improvements on products, processes or services that are not substantially set.

Funding Information

• A total of up to £4.7 million, inclusive of VAT, is allocated to this competition across all four themes.
• Contracts of up to £200,000, inclusive of VAT will be awarded to develop a prototype and undertake field testing between three to seven months and must be completed by 31 March 2026.

Ineligible Projects

• They will not fund projects that:
  • are not original in scope and duplicates someone else’s work
  • are not likely to be successfully exploited by the rail industry to deliver benefits to rail or light-rail organisations and their customers
  • are not at Rail Industry Readiness level 5 or above
  • are unable to deliver a demonstration event and trial within a representative environment, offering potential customers a chance to use the innovation and give feedback
  • do not include an evaluation and a plan to collect information to inform a cost or benefit analysis
  • would directly duplicate other UK government or EU funded initiatives you have already been funded to deliver
  • are covered by existing commercial agreements to deliver the proposed solutions

Eligibility Criteria

• Your project
  • Projects must:
    • start by 1 September 2025
    • end by 31 March 2026
    • last between three to seven months
    • have total costs of no more than £200,000, inclusive of VAT
  • Applicant
    • To lead a project, you can:
      • be an organisation of any size
      • work alone or with the subcontracted skills and expertise of others from businesses, research organisations, research and technology organisations or the third sector (charities, social enterprises and voluntary groups)
    • Contracts will be awarded to a single legal entity only. The majority of the project work and key deliverables including the project demonstration and trialling must be completed by the applicant and be carried out in the UK. Subcontractors can be used, but only for specialist skills.

For more information, visit Gov.UK.