Emergency services (Ambulance Service; Fire & Rescue Service) play a crucial role during flood response, as they participate in joint command-control structures and are central to rescue and relief efforts (Frost 2002). Emergency services are often legislated to meet defined response times. UK legislation requires that emergency responders comply with strict timeframes when reacting to incidents. Category 1 responders such as the Ambulance Service and the Fire & Rescue Service are required to reach 75% of 'Red 1' (high-priority, life-threatening incidents) in less than 8 and 10 minutes respectively from the time when the initial call was received. This includes blue-light incidents such as life-threatening and traumatic injury, cardiac arrest, road collisions, and individuals trapped by floodwaters. In 2015-16, only one England ambulance trust met the response time targets and 72.5% of the most serious (Red 1) calls were responded to within 8 minutes, against a legislative target of 75% (National Audit Office, 2017). Between 2007-2014, the highest percentage Scottish Ambulance Service achieved was 74.7% in 2013 (HEAT standard). Rising demand combined with inefficient call handling and dispatch systems are often cited as the reasons for missing the above targets. However, response times can also be affected by flood episodes which may limit the ability of emergency responders to navigate through a disrupted road network (as was the case during the widespread UK flooding in 2007). The impact of flooding on road networks is well known and is expected to get worse in a changing climate with more intense rainfall. For example, in Portland, USA under one climate change scenario, road closures due to flooding could increase time spent travelling by 10% (Chang et al. 2010). The impact of an increased number of flooding episodes, due to climate change, on road networks has also been modelled by for the Boston Metropolitan area, USA (Suarez et al., 2005). This study found that between 2000 and 2100 delays and trip-time losses could increase by 80% and 82% respectively. The Pitt Review (2008) suggested that some collaborative decision making during the 2007 event was hampered by insufficient preparation and a lack of information, and better planning and higher levels of protection for critical infrastructure are needed to avoid the loss of essential services such as water and power. More recently, the National Flood Resilience Review (HMG, 2016) exposes the extent to which a significant proportion of critical assets are still vulnerable to flooding in England and Wales. In particular, it highlights that the loss of infrastructure services can have significant impacts on people's health and wellbeing. This project will combine: (i) an established accessibility mapping approach; (ii) existing national flood datasets; and (iii) a locally tested, recent-expanded real-time flood nowcasting/forecasting system to generate accessibility mapping, vulnerability assessment and adaptation evaluation for various flood conditions and at both the national and city-region scale. The project will be delivered via three sequential Work Packages, including: (a) Mapping emergency service accessibility according to legislative timeframes; (b) Assessing the vulnerability of populations (care homes, hospices and schools); and (c) Evaluating adaptation strategies (e.g. positioning standby vehicles).

Government policies across many fields are currently being steered by the concept of 'behaviour change' as a 'light-touch' alternative to regulation. Behaviour is neither simple to understand, nor to change. Current political circumstances have led to a high profile for a group of approaches that are aimed at 'nudging' behaviours, however the theories and understanding behind these are just one of a range of possible ways of interpreting the reasons people behave in the ways that they do. Not all behaviours are alike, and in terms of developing effective policies it is useful to have a range of possible approaches to choose from. For the non-expert though, understanding potential complementarities or conflicts between different approaches can pose a significant barrier to employing new strategies or to using a variety of methods, particularly when certain approaches may have more political acceptability despite potentially not being as effective. The project will provide support to a range of stakeholders involved in developing and implementing policies around public behaviours in relation to energy usage and climate change. Following on from a successful 12-month social science placement Fellowship in DECC, the project will allow Dr Chatterton to build on the work and relationships already established in the Fellowship, in order to improve understanding with regard to a) public behaviours and social practices, and b) cross-departmental challenges in relation to climate change policies. The project has support from the four government departments most closely identified with climate and energy related behaviours (DECC; the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra); the Department for Transport (DfT), and the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG)). This will provide Dr Chatterton access to spend time within each Department (an average of one month per Department) to help them to implement the latest thinking on behaviours into policies, and through concurrently working with the various Departments, take the opportunity to help them better understand the overlaps and possible conflicts or synergies between their respective policies. The project will also take the learning from the original Fellowship, as well as from the departmental working, and share it with a limited number of relevant stakeholders from businesses and NGOs working in the area. This will help them improve their understanding of current approaches to behaviour, so as to enable them to more effectively play a positive role in their work with government and the public.

Risks that affect the built environment and threaten human life are becoming major societal issues in the 21st century. Managing these risks and responding to emergencies such as fires, floods, and terrorist attacks is important and needs to be planned efficiently and effectively to ensure minimal impact on society. The government's White paper Our Fire and Rescue Service published in 2003 introduced reforms that refocused the role of the Fire and Rescue Service on the prevention of fires and broadened its role in dealing with other growing threats resulting from climate change and man-made disasters. As a result, a new statutory framework is now in existence that places a responsibility on the FRS to produce Integrated Risk Management Plans (IRMPs) to plan for, and respond to, a range of emergencies.The aim of IRMPs is to improve community safety and make a more effective use of FRS resources by: reducing the incidence of fires; reducing loss of life in fires and accidents; reducing the number and severity of injuries; safeguarding the environment and protecting the national heritage; and providing communities with value for money . The White paper also highlighted that new ideas for the fire and rescue service must be based on evidence from rigorous research based on the review of technologies and underpinning science on fire prevention, detection and suppression.The work in this proposal is part of the joint national initiative between the EPSRC and the Communities and Local Government (CLG) to encourage and support research on how to identify, measure and mitigate the social and economic impact that fire and other emergencies can be expected to have on individuals, communities, commerce, industry, the environment and heritage . This is in response to the government's drive to introduce changes for the Fire and Rescue Service making this proposed research timely as it contributes to the CLG's efforts to implement the FRS reforms. There has been a great deal of research on risk assessment and risk management within the context of fire and other emergencies, most of this work focused on estimating the probability of risks and their impact quantified in terms of damage and loss by modelling fire growth and spread. However the integration of the performance and effectiveness of prevention and protection measures used in buildings while developing risk management plans to allocate fire and rescue resources has received little attention. Recent efforts within the CLG, the home Office, and the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister investigated risk assessment as part of the development of a process for planning Fire Service Emergency Cover (FSEC). Part of this work resulted in the development of a toolkit to assess risk, plan response, and model the consequences of resource deployment. However the new requirements of IRMPs that need a holistic and integrated approach and focus on prevention are introducing further research challenges, these can be summarised as follows: 1. lack of evidence based methods for the assessment of the effectiveness of prevention and protection measures used in buildings; 2. difficulties in assessing and predicting property, heritage, and human loss; 3. the need for decision making tools for the cost effective allocation of prevention and protection resources. The main aim of the research in this proposal is to build on the work by the CLG and investigate the value and effectiveness of prevention and protection measures and activities used in commercial, public and heritage buildings with the view of improving decision making on the allocation of resources within the context of IRMP. The main outcome of he research will be the development of tools that will support the FRS in decision making regarding: the value of prevention and protection measures in the built environment; and the allocation of resources for fire safety interventions.

European cities face complex challenges that demand smart solutions. This project puts urban intermediaries, those people who can bring people and resources together in innovative ways, at the heart of smart urban development and sets out to understand how they create social innovation. We will carry out fieldwork in four European cities (Birmingham, Copenhagen, Glasgow and Amsterdam) where we will develop collaborative working groups, or 'living labs', which will be sources of data as well as sites for learning across projects, fields of practice, cities and countries. In sum, we will advance knowledge of how intermediaries innovate and generate smart urban development, by creating opportunities for collaborative research, dialogue and learning across Europe.

The UK Government's Hate Crime Action Plan (Home Office 2016) stresses the need to tackle hate speech on social media by bringing together policymakers with academics to improve the analysis and understanding of the patterns and drivers of cyberhate and how these can be addressed. Furthermore, the recent Home Affairs Select Committee Inquiry (2016) 'Hate Crime and its Violent Consequences' highlighted the role of social media in the propagation of hate speech (on which the proposers were invited to provide evidence). This proposal acknowledges the migration of hate to social media is non-trivial, and that empirically we know very little about the utility of Web based forms data for measuring online hate speech and counter hate speech at scale and in real-time. This became particularly apparent following the referendum on the UK's future in the European Union, where an inability to classify and monitor hate speech and counter speech on social media in near-real-time and at scale hindered the use of these new forms of data in policy decision making in the area of hate crime. It was months later that small-scale grey literature emerged providing a 'snap-shot' of the problem (Awan & Zempi 2016, Miller et al. 2016). In partnership with the UK Head of the Cross-Government Hate Crime Programme at the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), and the London Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime's (MOPAC) new Online Hate Crime Hub, the proposed project will co-produce evidence on how social media data, harnessed by new Social Data Science methods and scalable infrastructure, can inform policy decision making. We will achieve this by taking the social media reaction to the referendum on the UK's future in the European Union as a demonstration study, and will co-develop with the Policy CI transformational New Forms of Data Capability contributions including: (i) semi-automated methods that monitor the production and spread of cyberhate around the case study and beyond; (ii) complementary methods to study and test the effectiveness of counter speech in reducing the propagation of cyberhate, and (iii) a technical system that can support real time analysis of hate and counter speech on social media at scale following 'trigger events', integrated into existing policy evidence-based decision-making processes. The system, by estimating the propagation of cyberhate interactions within social media using machine learning techniques and statistical models, will assist policymakers in identifying areas that require policy attention and better targeted interventions in the field of online hate and antagonistic content.