This research looks to understand how small industrial towns in the UK, and in other countries such as Finland and the Netherlands, have successfully built a degree of sustainability that is not yet well understood. We hope that this will challenge current dominant models or understandings of 'industrial and post-industrial decline'. One quarter of people living in Europe live in small industrial towns, yet there is very little evidence or policy development that specifically deals with them. Often they are characterised as being in post-industrial decline or with population shrinkage. This prevailing narrative also influences the policy development which affects them or the re-development strategies they undergo or are presented with, which tend to focus on promoting the service industry or creating regional hubs and which overlook the industrial nature and assets of towns. Recently it has become clear, especially through the latest global economic crisis, that this understanding of industrial towns as declining or deprived is limited. In particular, it overlooks what we believe is likely to be the importance of locality, and cultural and social relationships which exist in small industrial towns. It is not well understood why some towns buck the trends of decline or shrinkage and there are particular cases where towns form part of successful 'development corridors'. These have not been studied previously at this scale. This project argues that industrial towns are not inevitably associated with post-industrial shrinkage and that we need to understand the complex relationships between different aspects of their growth and development. We think that small industrial towns will be characterised by a range of factors that are as much social and cultural as they are economic. For example, overlooked areas and attributes which are likely to sustain town development include local industrial traditions and social relationships, and specific histories of development and growth. Size is also likely to be important to maintaining personal networks of cooperation and potentially underlying sustainability. We also think that towns will have different types of attributes that are often overlooked in policy terms but which would help us understand them better: socio-cultural, personal relationships, history and culture, as well as the ways people work and cooperate together. Our evidence collection will focus on different ways to find out about and understand these characteristics, one important aspect of which is locals' own narratives and understandings of what makes each town sustainable. We also plan to explore how these traditions, cultural relationships and ways of working might help them develop further as social innovations. Social innovation deals with the idea that we can find solutions to entrenched problems in ways which benefit society. We believe that if we apply the lens of social innovation to these places we would be able to view them in a new way which would have impact on policy and public services, because it would offer an alternative approach to development and ways of working in each town. This approach is likely to help create a pathway for 'bright futures' which build on these strengths. The project consortium is composed of a range of country partners carefully chosen for their regional diversification and coverage across different European development areas. This will enable the project team to make comparisons across different types of small industrial towns in difference places and contexts. From this, we will develop recommendations and guidance for understanding and working with particular types of small industrial towns in the future.

This research will develop a 'borrowers-eye-view' of the different competing offers of payday loans and alternative forms of credit. We will conduct in-depth interviews with low income borrowers to evaluate how the experience of taking out a payday loan compares to alternative forms of credit. We will then carry out a series of participative workshops to co-design with low income borrowers an alternative credit offer that would meet borrowers' demands while offering less harmful financial terms. The research will conclude with publications for both academic and non-academic audiences and a series of dissemination events to share findings with policymakers and delivery organisations. The research has been designed to support the Welsh government's objective of mitigating the effects of poverty and, in particular, its goal of increasing the use of credit unions as an alternative to more harmful forms of short-term credit. The work starts from the premise that product design-and the design of the broader alternative credit offer (from how it is delivered to how it is perceived in the local community)-will be decisive to the success or failure of this strategy. Getting product design right will require a richer and more detailed understanding of the user-experience of different forms of credit than we have today. It will also require greater involvement from borrowers in describing what would work as a genuine alternative to payday loans. The wider context for the work is the risk that, for a large swathe of the Welsh population on low incomes, the economic recovery could be marred by an historic overhang of debt. Overall UK consumer debt trebled in value from 1993 to 2013 reaching £158 billion, leaving many in poverty to face high debt repayments and chronic uncertainty as interest rates now start to rise. Nowhere are these risks sharper than in the case of payday loans. The UK payday loan industry, covering short-term and high interest rate debts, grew from £100 million to £1.7 billion in the seven years from 2004. The Public Accounts Committee estimates that there are now around 2 million payday loan customers in the UK. This staggering rise of extremely high-interest-rate debt threatens to shape the way many in poverty experience the economic recovery, reducing household spending power, increasing insecurity, and derailing anti-poverty strategies. There is already growing evidence of the personal costs of short-term credit. The debt charity StepChange has recorded a 44 per cent increase in Wales in the number of people calling their helpline for advice since 2010. The Citizens Advice Bureau in Wales reported in May 2013 that the number of people seeking help to deal with debts emerging from use of payday loans rose from 93 to 609 in just one year, a rise of 555%. Levels of debt are increasing. In Cardiff, the average payday lending balance rose 42% in just one year from 2011 to 2012. A similar picture is portrayed by StepChange analysis of its clients in Wales, with 18% reporting struggling with a payday loan in 2013 compared to 2.6% in 2010. This research will support policymakers in a strategy of encouraging alternative forms of credit, giving the richest and most detailed evaluation to date of different credit offers from a borrowers-eye-view, and working with low income borrowers themselves to sketch out what would work as a viable alternative.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

The Share-to-Know Partnership will improve access to learning for young people furthest from the labour market by advancing non-formal education, specifically peer-to-peer learning. This innovative approach is of particular value in engaging individuals at risk of long-term unemployment, for example, those with a negative experience of education and the large numbers of young Europeans who are NEET. The partnership has the following specific objectives:1: to create an online platform for sharing best practice among peer-to-peer education specialists and engage stakeholders from youth work, formal education and employment sectors from across Europe via this platform in order to increase understanding of the effectiveness of peer-to-peer education2: to develop effective and engaging pedagogical methods for structuring employment-related peer-to-peer-learning courses for young people3: to develop effective methods for engaging NEET young people in peer-to-peer-education4: to create the ‘Share-to-Know Network’ of European expert practitioners in peer-to-peer learning in order to support the adoption of effective methods and online open education resources in peer-to-peer learning courses for NEET young people5: to improve impact measurement and evaluation techniques for peer-to-peer education initiatives6: to develop effective recognition/accreditation tools for informal learning achievements The partnership consists of 3 organisations from the formal education, informal education and youth work sectors, with significant expertise in implementing employment-related peer-to-peer courses with NEET young people. In the course of the project, the partnership will come together for 6 transnational meetings featuring expert exchanges between partnership members and external stakeholders on peer-to-peer education methods, youth engagement methods, building partnerships with employers, locally accepted accreditation tools, impact measurement and sustainable business models. During the transnational meetings innovative methods in these areas will be identified and integrated via a real-world prototyping process into the ongoing learning operations of the partners, in order to test and evaluate their transferability and effectiveness. Following an editing and feedback process involving external stakeholders, the evaluation reports on the prototypes will be collated into the peer-to-peer education practitioners manual. Based on the current participants of the partner organisations, it is expected that of the 240 young learners, participating in the prototypes, at least 200 will be NEET. Alongside the prototyping schedule, the partnership will initiate and build up the Share-to-Know Network. During the 6 planned multiplier events, at least 270 representatives of peer-to-peer education practitioners and stakeholders from youth work organisations, informal and formal education providers, education policy makers and employer-representatives from across Europe, and in particular from countries with high youth unemployment and rates of NEET young people, will be engaged. A larger group of European stakeholders will be engaged via the Share-to-Know website, Network-newsletters, social media channels and the 5 webinars during the transnational meetings.The partnership will produce a range of good practice guidance and innovative tools on all areas vital to the implementation of peer-to-peer education with NEET young people. The topics will be the engagement of NEET young people in peer-to-peer education, effective peer-to-peer education methods in employment-related courses, locally accepted accreditation and partnerships with employers, effective impact measurement for peer-to-peer education and a collection of case studies on sustainable business models for peer-to-peer education initiatives. The partnership will also create the online Share-to-Know website as a publishing and networking platform for relevant resources, news, online learning events (webinars) and networking opportunities from the partnership as well as external stakeholders. All engaged stakeholders who are already practicing peer-to-peer education or are interested in engaging with it, will be invited to join the Share-to-Know Network, which will help disseminate good practice, connect stakeholders from across Europe and raise the profile of peer-to-peer education. Expected impacts are an increase in the number of NEET young people engaged in education or training, improved quality of employment-related peer-to-peer education provision for NEET young people, an increase in online and offline peer-to-peer education courses offered for this target group, better networking amongst peer-to-peer education practitioners, heightened awareness and recognition of the peer-to-peer education approach and its accreditation amongst education policy makers, employers and formal education providers.

According to the London Futures Deloitte report (Frey and Osborne, 2014), 35 per cent of the current workforce in the UK is at risk of being made redundant over the next two decades as a result of the introduction of digital robots that will replace their tasks. For those that manage to remain employed, it is difficult to predict whether and how they are able to adapt their skills to the changing demand for occupational tasks. One emerging trend is that, after the introduction of new digital capital, firms dismiss large shares of medium-skilled workers, while seeking either low skilled workers to perform highly routinised tasks, or very high skilled people who provide creative ideas and apply sophisticated knowledge to maximise the benefits of digital capital. The polarisation of demand for tasks and the skills required to perform them is likely to be reflected in a similar polarisation of wages. This will depend on how firms decide to increase digital mechanisation, for instance what type of hardware and software services they purchase, and what types of new occupations this new capital requires. Also, as pointed out by Piketty (2014), rising share of capital in production goes hand in hand with decreasing share of labour, favouring top income concentration. Overall, innovative firms might be responsible for increasing income inequality, both through higher concentration of capital returns in the hands of a few creative CEOs and a higher proportion of the wage bill going to a proportionally smaller share of very high-skilled workers. This research aims to provide comparative evidence on the core mechanisms behind the effects of technical change on income inequality, by looking at the actors directly involved in their occurrence: firms investing in tangible, digital capital and R&D, and households providing skilled and unskilled workforce respectively employed in un-routinised and routinised tasks, and the associated distribution of wage and non-wage income. The novel contribution of this research compared to the extant literature is in the following aspects. First, we will uniquely combine, at the spatial level, plant-level data on tangible, digital and R&D investments of firms located in a certain area, defined as Travel-To-Work-Area (TTWA) and data on occupational categories, wage and non-wage earnings of household living in the same TTWA. TTWAs are defined by the Office for National Statistics as self-contained local labour markets. Second, we will study how technical change, through creative destruction, changes top income shares, wage distribution, and capital income distribution, at the level of TTWA. Third, we will analyse the temporal and spatial associations between the level and composition of investments in tangible, digital capital and R&D in firms and (i) changes in individual's occupational choice across job categories, and (ii) changes in wages at different quantiles of the wage distribution. This research adds to a debate on pressing social and policy issues: income inequality and unemployment. It is therefore particularly relevant not only for the academic community, but also for policy makers, innovative employers, public, social and private enterprises, trade unions, training institutions and young and old members of the workforce that seek and use information on employment and investment decisions. Our dissemination plan ensures that the findings of our research reach all the above stakeholders to inform their decision-making processes.