December signpost
Welcome to our monthly Signpost — pulling together some of the policy-focussed research across the University of Leeds.
Cost of living — focus on poverty
Over the past month, there has been a significant body of work shared by University of Leeds researchers around the cost of living. Work done by the Consumer Data Research Centre at Leeds has created an interactive map to show where communities have inadequate access to affordable healthy and sustainable foods. Work by Dr Daniel Edmiston also shows the effects of benefit deductions on experiences of poverty in Leeds.
Meanwhile Professor Lucie Middlemiss and colleagues from Fuel Poverty Evidence UK are working to create a body of evidence to support better development of fuel poverty policy. For more information, you can follow the research group on Twitter and LinkedIn
New policy projects supported by Research England funding
We had a fantastic number of high-quality applications for the Research England policy support and participatory research funds, and are pleased to share the successful policy-facing awards are:
Addressing barriers in political engagement
Cristina Leston-Bandeira, Emma McIntosh (UK Parliament), Gareth Price (Welsh Parliament)
This group will work to understand why citizens from seldom-heard groups rarely get involved in Parliamentary petitions, and what could lead to further involvement from them.
Sustainable development and participatory placemaking: understanding city spaces
Joanne Hawkins
A project to work with Leeds City Council and East Street Arts, which will develop an interactive map offering insights on how people’s sense of place is shaped, and what this means for local policy and planning decisions.
Integrating intercultural cities through belonging in green spaces
Gehan Selim, Pam Birtill, Rebecca Brunk, Jill Dickinson
Working with community partners and Leeds City Council, this project will build a policy toolkit supporting the use of green spaces to build intercultural spaces and belonging.
Mapping cultural engagement with schools in Leeds to inform cultural strategy
Briony Thomas, Jamie Marsden, Gaby Paradis (Leeds City Council), Chris Ansell (Leeds 2023), Giles Dring and Michelle Brook (Open Innovations)
This project aims to support evidence-based policy making through the creation of a prototype open-data resource, mapping cultural engagement in schools across the city, and enabling correlation with other open data sets, such as from the ONS.
Include!
Joanne Armitage, Helen Thornham, Emma Treggedin and Dawn Fuller (Space 2)
A look at how communities can feel greater ownership of place and culture through using digital technologies, and how this could be supported by the Digital Inclusion Practices and Policies of Leeds City Council.
Centre for Cultural Value (CCV) — Building policy impact
Ben Walmsley
The Centre for Cultural Value will work with Leeds City Council and Culture Commons to meaningfully measure cultural impact and the value of culture to the city.
Promoting inclusive Human Resource management practices for NHS ethnic minorities colleagues wellbeing
Lynda Song, Ahmed Mostafa, Aleksandra Irnazarow
Engaging with Leeds City Council, Leeds Teaching Hospitals and other local health partners, this project will co-create policy for inclusive human resource management practices system, to support ethnic minorities colleague wellbeing.
Developing an online behaviour change intervention to support NHS healthcare professionals’ policy-related practices
Chris Keyworth, Judith Johnson, Mark Conner
Building on previous work, the group will develop and test the effectiveness of a web-based open-access behaviour change intervention to improve NHS healthcare professionals’ engagement with the “Making Every Contact Count” policy.
Transforming the culture underpinning Disabled Children’s Services: focussing on family support needs not parental failings
Luke Clements
The project will seek to co-produce parent-led draft guidance for assessing the needs of disabled children. This builds on work supported by Celebra UK, which found an institutional culture of parent blame in current assessment processes.
Addressing inequalities in food and health experienced by those from African Caribbean backgrounds in Leeds
Sally Moore, Peter Ho, Tanefa Apekey (Leeds Beckett University), Ether Bissell (Feel Good Factor)
A pilot intervention evaluation of the use of resources, and potential impact of these on service-users’ food behaviours, and cultural competency of practitioner staff, at a Leeds community organisation.
Evidence-based policy placement: Delivering the Leeds Food Strategy
Neil Boyle, Louise Dye
Neil will be embedded at Leeds City Council to work directly and collaboratively with policy teams, contributing evidence to inform and evaluate policies and interventions in delivering the Leeds Food Strategy.
Mapping advertising assets across the city of Leeds
Victoria Jenneson, Michelle Morris, Charlotte Evans
This project will support Leeds City Council to understand the potential for their advertising spaces to help people in Leeds make affordable, healthy and sustainable dietary choices, informing development their Healthier Food Advertising policy.
Reuse to reduce food waste: understand policy barriers preventing food upcycling
Alessandro Biraglia, Gulbanu Kaptan, Luca Sabini
Looking at barriers to food upcycling at National and local levels (upcycled foods use ingredients that would have otherwise been wasted), this project will develop a policy roadmap for more sustainable practices, and identify opportunities for the Leeds City Region for innovation partnerships.
Best practice in food hubs
Effie Papargyropoulou
This project will work with Leeds Food hubs to evaluate the benefits food hubs bring to communities, develop best practice, and find replicable and scalable elements that could support the development of other food hubs.
Temporary crating to reduce piglet mortality
Katie McDermott
This project will develop evidence to inform DEFRA as they review the use of crates and cages in animal production.
Hedgerows and their public goods: evidence base for policymakers
A synthesis of current evidence on the multiple benefits of hedgerows (such as supporting biodiversity, air quality, flood and climate mitigation), this project will also identify policy options that could protect, restore and create new hedgerows in the UK and EU countries.
A participatory approach to enhanced surface water flood forecasting
Cathryn Birch, Ben Maybee, Emma Cowan, Joe Holden
This project builds on work developing an enhanced surface water flood forecasting tool for Yorkshire, in collaboration with the local flood response community. We aim to scale up the regional forecast system to cover the entire of England and Wales, allowing the forecasts to be incorporated into a Met Office UK summer testbed in 2023. We are also building on the networks built with Yorkshire flood responders to pull together a national forum which will engage and unite the national surface water flooding community.
Promoting inclusive growth via developing exporting
Yingqi Wei, Frank McDonald, Emma Liu, Han Jin
Working with West Yorkshire Combined Authority, the project will identify key factors that drive the export performance of local companies, to inform development of policy to strengthen export performance and inclusive growth in the West Yorkshire region.
Research England’s policy support fund is intended to help start and enhance research activity working in collaboration with policymakers, and to foster a research culture that actively collaborates in the policy sphere.
We will be sharing more details about these policy-focussed projects as they progress — follow us on Twitter @PolicyLeeds to stay up to date.
Evidence Week in Parliament
This year the University of Leeds partnered with Science About Science for Evidence Week 2022. Three groups of researchers, representing Leeds and other partner organisations, travelled to UK Parliament to discuss their research with MPs.
Evidence Week is an annual event that aims to increase the use of research-informed evidence in the development of policy. The researchers who attended this event are following up with those they spoke to on the day, and speaking with other MPs who were not able to attend, to offer support in using research to inform parliamentary debate.
You can find more on the evidence provided in the researchers’ policy briefs:
Fuel Poverty in the Cost of Living Crisis
Supporting movement skulls to improve health and education in the population
Reducing restrictive practices across health, education and criminal justice settings
COP27 Climate Conference
A delegation from University of Leeds, an official observer of the UNFCCC, were at Sharm El Sheikh for this year’s climate conference. There were also a range of events and activities held across campus to encourage discussion on climate change for those who couldn’t be in Egypt.
You can take a look at reflections from the climate experts on the Priestley International Centre For Climate website, as well as diaries from the Leeds COP27 delegation and a look back at the key themes addressed in this year’s climate conference.
You can also read Rebecca Sarku and Stephen Whitfield’s policy brief on delivering a just transformation through the Koronivia Joint Work on Agriculture, which they presented at the Food Systems Pavillion.
Culture x Policy
At the beginning of last month, Centre for Cultural Value (CCV) director, Professor Ben Walmsley, wrote his five steps for engaging policymakers with research, following the production of CCV’s free-to-access guide: How to shape cultural policy through research
Both are designed to introduce researchers to working with policy, with guidance on best practice and managing expectations.
Get in touch
If you would like to share tips on effective collaboration within your sector, please send us an email policyleeds@leeds.ac.uk or a tweet @PolicyLeeds — we would love to hear from you.
