内容摘要："We'll have a lot less growth and job creation than we had forecasted in the past."

"We'll have a lot less growth and job creation than we had forecasted in the past."

"It was going great until it fell apart." Richard Varvill recalls the emotional shock that hits home when a high-tech venture goes off the rails.The former chief technology officer speaks ruefully about his long career trying to bring a revolutionary aerospace engine to fruition at UK firm Reaction Engines.

The origins of Reaction Engines go back to the Hotol project in the 1980s. This was a futuristic space plane that caught the public imagination with the prospect of a British aircraft flying beyond the atmosphere.The secret sauce of Hotol was heat exchanger technology, an attempt to cool the super-heated 1,000C air that enters an engine at hypersonic speeds.Without cooling this will melt aluminium, and is, Mr Varvill says, "literally too hot to handle".

Fast forward three decades to October 2024 and Reaction Engines was bringing the heat exchanger to life at sites in the UK and US.UK Ministry of Defence funding took the company into hypersonic research with Rolls-Royce for an unmanned aircraft. But that was not enough to keep the business afloat.

Rolls-Royce declines to go into details about Reaction's collapse, but Mr Varvill is more specific.

"Rolls-Royce said it had other priorities and the UK military has very little money."A TikTok spokesperson said: "We have policies and processes in place with our sellers to ensure the safety of food and beverages sold on our platform and we will remove products that breach these policies."

However, it is currently possible to sell food on TikTok Shop without providing any ingredient or allergy information.The BBC found one seller, Mega Buy UK, selling a sweet treat related to the popular Netflix show Squid Game and listed the ingredients and allergens as "not applicable".

Another UK-based seller called The Nashville Burger listed a burger-making kit that contained milk - one of the 14 allergens food businesses in the UK are required to declare on labels. It also contained wheat - which should be listed as an allergen under cereals containing gluten.However, on TikTok Shop, the allergen information was given as "spices" and the ingredient description simply said "flour".