As a result of global climate change, the UK is expected to experience hotter and drier summers, and heatwaves are expected to occur with greater frequency, intensity and duration. In 2003 and 2018, 2,091 and 863 heat-related deaths, respectively, were reported in England alone as a result of heatwaves, meaning future temperature increases could lead to a parallel rise in heat-related mortality. The UK also currently has a rapidly ageing population, with people aged 75 or over expected to account for 13% of the total population by 2035. Older populations are more vulnerable to climate-induced effects as they are more likely to have underlying, chronic health complications, making them more vulnerable to heat stress. The indoor environment is a principle moderator of heat exposure in older populations, who tend to spend the majority of their time indoors. Poor building design, the lack of effective heat management and diverging needs and preferences between staff and residents in care settings may contribute to increased indoor heat exposure with detrimental health impacts falling on the most vulnerable residents. Maladaptation to a warming climate, such as the uptake of air conditioning, could increase fuel bills in care homes, increase operational costs for businesses in the already financially stretched care sector, and increase building carbon emissions, thus undermining government efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The one-year pilot project 'Climate Resilience of Care Settings' and previous small-scale studies led by our research team have shown that UK care homes are already overheating even under non-extreme summers. A key target for climate adaptation in care settings is to limit such risks by introducing passive cooling strategies via building design. However, preliminary modelling as part of the pilot project also demonstrated that common passive cooling strategies may not adequately mitigate overheating risk in the 2050s and 2080s. Further research into advanced passive cooling strategies, combined with human behaviour and organisational change is required to identify optimum climate adaptation pathways for UK's care provision. The main aim of the project is to quantify climate related heat risks in care settings nationwide and enhance understanding of human behaviour, organisational capacity and governance to enable the UK's care provision to develop equitable adaptation pathways to rising heat stress under climate change. Building on the foundations of the pilot project, this novel, interdisciplinary project will collect, for the first time in the UK, longitudinal temperature and humidity data in a panel of 50 care settings in order to quantify the recurring risk of summertime overheating. We will also identify and assess social, institutional and cultural barriers and opportunities underpinning the governance of adaptation to a warmer climate in care and extra-care homes through surveys with residents, frontline care staff, managers and policy stakeholders. Within sub-samples of this panel, we will use innovative measurement techniques to collect residents' physiological data and study their relation with heat exposure and health impacts. Also for the first time in the UK, we will create a building stock model of the UK's care provision able to predict future overheating risks in care settings under a range of future climate change scenarios. This will help evaluate the effectiveness of near, medium and long term future overheating mitigation strategies and policies on thermal comfort and health outcomes. Throughout the project, we will continue to develop and expand the stakeholder community that was created during the pilot project. Through ongoing dialogue with our diverse network of stakeholders, we will explore organisational capacity and structures, and how these influence action and policy, in order to generate best practice guidance for practitioners, businesses and policymakers.

This project's aim is to explore the economic effects of diverse teams and workplaces - and the wider role of urban diversity - specifically, on entrepreneurship and firm-level innovation and productivity in the UK. These are important issues that are under-explored, especially in the UK, largely because of data challenges. And exploring these issues in the way we set out will make a valuable contribution to the huge, ongoing public debates on equalities, diversity and inclusion - both in the UK and across the world. Our project will combine administrative microdata, novel online data sources and frontier methods in econometrics and data science. Specifically, we will match LinkedIn data on individuals (via the Diffbot knowledge graph) to companies, then to administrative firm-level data (the Business Structure Database, plus patents and other info). Working in secure settings, we will use name analysis tools to probabilistically identify gender and ethnicity, and would also gather information on nationality and country of birth. We will focus the resulting panels on sectors where we're confident LinkedIn has good coverage - likely to be strategically important industries like tech, finance and business services - and run our data through multiple quality checks. We will use various tools to get closer to causality, including instrumental variable strategies and using policy 'shocks' such as a) Brexit and subsequent policy events, and b) recent UK gender pay gap legislation. We will also deploy a robust set of technical safeguards to ensure individuals' privacy, publishing only non-disclosive results. The project will develop new knowledge in an important but under-researched set of topics. In the process it would also build a unique data platform that other researchers could use in the future. We will work together with leading industry, policy and civil society stakeholders with expertise on relevant concepts, data/methods and policy agendas. These enable the project to directly contribute to economic policymaking on productivity and its drivers, including the UK's emerging levelling-up agenda, while also informing business decision-making and speaking to important and ongoing wider public conversations. The project will generate a series of linked outputs: 1/ Three research papers, covering links between gender and ethnic diversity (and their intersections) and firm-level productivity, innovation and entrepreneurship. These would be published as working papers on high-profile platforms, then submitted to peer-reviewed journals. 2/ Additional non-technical, short-form content for each paper - blogs, policy briefs and so on; inviting our network / community to co-author or directly contribute whenever possible; 3/ The underlying data platform, which (subject to permissions) we will make available to other researchers as a safeguarded data asset; 4/ The wider network / community of researchers and practitioners we will build through the co-production process.

As part of the government's response to COVID-19, 15,000 rough sleepers have now been offered self-contained temporary accommodation in England, mainly in hotels. This approach, which has involved the decanting of hostels, shelters and similar shared provision for rough sleepers, is a short-term response. When the lockdown ends, decisions will need to be taken about how to house former rough sleepers in line with the UK government's commitment to prevent people from going back to the streets - including, potentially, through the re-opening of shelter-type accommodation. Existing temporary accommodation with shared facilities might make it impossible for people to comply with government social distancing advice. So these decisions will impact on the risk of a second wave of infection from COVID-19 and possibly any mutations. This proposal outlines a unique time limited opportunity to conduct the first ever randomised controlled trial in the UK, to evaluate the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of permanent housing on the risk of COVID-19 infection and housing stability for people experiencing homelessness. That many homeless people are currently waiting to be housed means they can be randomly allocated to different housing solutions at scale quickly. The insights drawn from the short-term impacts of permanent housing can be used to inform other local authorities' responses to the challenges of COVID-19 and the cost-effectiveness of accommodation alternatives more broadly.

Community consultation is important for ensuring that we get a built environment that is fit for purpose and could be an opportunity for serious dialogue with the community about how best to make places for everybody, rather than the perfunctory and excluding affair it often is now. There is to date little consensus on how best to gather community responses to planning proposals to feed into the design and development of successful (high social, environmental and economic value) places. Ultimately community consultation has largely untapped potential for learning how the design of buildings and places can be done better, particularly important in the Climate Emergency and for 'building back better' in the aftermath of the pandemic. Although the focus of the project is on the UK, the problems are global and the outcomes scalable. In some parts of the country community consultation ceased during the pandemic, with decision making being delegated to pressurised Planning Officers who may not always have the interests of the community at heart. An imminent government review of planning in England is seeking to make the system more streamline. This could jeopardise community consultation which is known for being difficult and slow. A robust, inclusive, value for money format (digital and physical) for gathering data on what communities want from their buildings and places in the long term is urgently needed. To create such a platform is the aim of CCQoL. Led by the University of Reading, with Co-Investigators in all four countries of the UK, CCQoL is a collaboration with the Quality of Life Foundation, the community consultation platform Commonplace, inclusive consultation experts Urban Symbiotics and the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence (CACHE). It is supported by a wide range of policy and industry organisations including the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), Civic Voice and the British Property Federation. Following a review of best practice in community consultation, user experiences (face to face and digital) will be designed for piloting on real planning applications in each of the four countries of the UK. Consultations will take place in an 'urban room', a community space, disused shop or pop up in the city with parallel, but interconnected, consultations on line. Community members will be asked to contribute to the making of maps to show what they value in the area and to anticipate the potential impacts of the planning proposal. A variety of experimental formats will be used to make the consultation as engaging as possible. Locally based Community Partnership Managers will be employed to encourage inclusive participation. The platforms will be refined based on learning from the pilots. The main output will be a digital format for community consultation. This will link to the CCQoL platform, a series of digital maps which will offer a standardised format for gathering data on what communities want on an ongoing basis, scalable for use elsewhere with potential applications for other spheres of decision making. The Quality of Life Foundation and Commonplace will be responsible for the further development of the platform beyond the life of the project. Guidance for delivering face to face consultation on the ground will also be developed, as well as a series of reports on community consultation for each of the four UK planning contexts. This pragmatic project will be underpinned by robust academic research published through a series of refereed journal papers. A generation has grown up designing virtual environments in games such as Sim City. CCQoL will provide the next step towards a digitally generated and constructed, co-created built environment. The foundations of such a future need to be designed with great care to ensure that it fulfils its positive potential.

Policing is undergoing rapid transformation. As societies face new and more complex challenges, police workloads increasingly focus on managing risks of harm to vulnerable people. At the same time, public debate voicing concerns about police priorities is rising, driven by questions about what the police do and about legitimacy in the face of discriminatory practices. Dramatic increases in complex cases coupled with cuts to public services have resulted in the police frequently acting as 'the service of first resort', at the frontline of responding to urgent social problems such as mental illness, homelessness and exploitation. The presence of such vulnerabilities draw the police into responses alongside other service providers (such as health, social care and housing) often with little clarity of roles, boundaries or shared purpose. Simultaneously, the transformation of data and its use are beginning to reshape how public services operate. They raise new questions about how to work in ethical ways with data to understand and respond to vulnerability. These shifts in police-work are mirrored around the world and pose significant challenges to how policing is undertaken and how the police interact with other public services, as well as how policing affects vulnerable people who come into contact with services. The Vulnerability and Policing Futures Research Centre aims to understand how vulnerabilities shape demand for policing and how partner organisations can prevent future harm and vulnerability through integrated public service partnerships. Rooted in rich local data collection and deep dives into specific problems, the Centre will build a knowledge base with applications and implications across the UK and beyond. It will have significant reach through collaborative work with a range of regional, national and international partners, shaping policy and practice through networks, practitioner exchanges and comparative research, and through training the next generation of scholars to take forward new approaches to vulnerabilities research and co-production with service providers, service receivers and the public. The Centre will be an international focal point for research, policy, practice and public debate. Jointly led by York and Leeds, with expertise from Durham, Lancaster, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, UCL, Monash and Temple universities and the Police Foundation, and working with a network of 38 partners, it will explore fundamental questions regarding the role police and their partners should play in modern society. While focusing policing effort on the most vulnerable holds promise for a fairer society, targeting specific groups raises questions about who counts as vulnerable and has the potential to stigmatise and increase intervention in the lives of marginalised citizens. At a critical time of change for policing, the Centre will ensure that research, including evidence drawing on public opinion and the voices of vulnerable people, is at the heart of these debates. The Centre will undertake three interconnected strands of research. The first focuses on how vulnerability develops in urban areas, drawing together diverse public sector datasets (police, health, social services and education) to understand interactions between agencies and the potential to prevent vulnerabilities. The second explores how police and partners can best collaborate in response to specific vulnerabilities, including exploitation by County Lines drug networks, online child sexual exploitation, domestic abuse, modern slavery, mental illness and homelessness. The third will combine research into public opinion with a programme to embed research evidence into policy, practice and public debate, creating a new understanding of vulnerability and transforming capability to prevent harm and future vulnerabilities through integrated partnership working, reshaping the future of policing as a public service.