Merge pull request #339 from alan-turing-institute/2026-04-20/encode-… #827

Job	Run time
Test on ubuntu-latest with Python 3.11	2m 30s
Test on ubuntu-latest with Python 3.12	2m 33s
Test on windows-latest with Python 3.11	4m 22s
Test on macos-latest with Python 3.11	3m 44s
Test on macos-latest with Python 3.12	5m 14s
Test on windows-latest with Python 3.12	4m 41s
	23m 4s

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