Context of the research Drug and/or alcohol misuse by a parent can be harmful to children and wider family members. Because of this, parents who misuse drugs or alcohol often receive health and social care services to help them reduce their misuse and to protect their children. Having another parent or carer who does not misuse drugs or alcohol can be protective for children. However, little is understood about how to best support these parents and carers who are often overlooked regarding support. Our project will work closely with these 'affected' parents/carers and their children as well as with health and social care professionals involved in their care to develop an intervention which specifically supports to the non-substance misusing parent/carer. Aims and objectives In our project we will: - Map what support is currently available for families affected by a parent's drug or alcohol misuse to find out what works well and what does not. We will do this by working in groups with different health and social care professionals across the North East of England. - We will also ask children who are affected by parental drug or alcohol misuse and their parents/carers who do not misuse drugs or alcohol who they think can provide them with the most useful support, including family members, friends and local volunteer groups. - We will ask the non drug or alcohol-misusing parents and carers how best to help them support children affected by parental alcohol or drug misuse. - We will combine what we learnt and share this with parents/carers and health and social care professionals in workshops. We will work in partnership to develop a new way of helping parents and carers in their caregiving role. This will be the 'Safe Space Intervention'. Potential application and benefits The Safe Space intervention will be delivered to parents/carers of children aged 0-17 years (inclusive) who live within families affected by parental drug or alcohol misuse. Whilst these families often have a range of health and social care needs, we think that families who receive 'early help' and children's social care services will be the most likely group to receive the intervention as there is greatest need in this population. The Safe Space intervention aims to benefit children (improving their emotional wellbeing); their caregivers (improving their emotional wellbeing, quality of life and awareness of parental drug or alcohol misuse); the family (family functioning) and the professionals that support them (reducing the need for health and social care services including safeguarding services and increased confidence when supporting families affected).

The Climate Change Act 2008 requires a 34% cut in 1990 greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 and at least an 80% reduction in emissions by 2050. Residential and commercial buildings account for 25% and 18% of the UK's total CO2 emissions respectively and therefore have a significant role to play in a national decarbonisation strategy. As the UK has some of the oldest and least efficient buildings in Europe, there is substantial scope for improving the efficiency of energy end-use within UK buildings. However efforts to improve building energy efficiency, specifically the thermal efficiency of the building fabric, have to date focused primarily on the analysis and assessment of single properties. The slow uptake of insulation measures through the Green Deal and Energy Companies Obligation testifies to the difficulty of achieving these changes on a house-by-house basis. If the UK is to achieve its energy and climate policy targets, then a more ambitious whole-city approach to building energy improvements is needed. Technical innovations in remote sensing and infrared thermography mean that it is now possible to conduct building efficiency surveys at a mass scale. The challenge is how such data can be improved (for example moving from 2D plan imagery to 3D models of the built environment) and combined with systems analysis tools to inform effective retrofit strategies. The Urban Scale Building Energy Network will investigate this research challenge by bringing together five academic co-investigators with disciplinary expertise from across the building retrofit value chain from remote autonomous sensing to building physics, energy systems design, consumer behaviour and policy. Working with two experienced mentors from the fields of energy systems and building energy services, the co-investigators will undertake a series of activities in collaboration with project partners from industry and government to better understand the research challenge and develop roadmaps for future research. The activities include: - Two workshops and a series of bilateral meetings for the academic team to learn about each other's expertise and how it can be coordinated and brought to bear on the research challenge. The project mentors will play a crucial role here, helping the co-investigators to create personal development plans that will build both technical and non-technical skills for successful careers. - A workshop with over 20 representatives from government and industry to discuss previous experience and the perceived obstacles to more ambitious building energy retrofits. - An active online communications strategy incorporating a project website, YouTube videos, and a Twitter hashtag campaign in order to engage the general public and understand how households and commercial building occupants understand the challenge of transforming the UK's building stock. - A feasibility study to summarize the state of the art in new sensing technologies and analysis techniques for building thermal energy performance assessment and to identify major outstanding challenges for future research proposals. The proposed network will therefore facilitate collaboration between academics, industry, government and the general public to address a question of great national importance. The project outputs will help to create a wider understanding of the specific challenges facing the UK's aspirations for the transformation of its building stock as well as highlighting potentially fruitful avenues for research. The network therefore aspires to build upon this twelve-month programme of work and develop significant long-term research collaborations with benefits for academic knowledge, society and the wider economy.

Background: Children consume a third of their food at school, providing an opportunity to promote healthy diets and reduce levels of obesity. The World Health Organisation and UK government recommend that schools adopt approaches across the whole school day that support children to make healthy food choices, offering consistency in the quality of foods provided, eating culture, education about diet, and use of food to learn. In reality, uptake is poor, partly due to lack of direction on how to use such an approach, but also because schools work in highly complex environments with multiple competing demands, and influences from wider factors like national policy, cultural beliefs, population characteristics, costs and catering requirements. Methods: We will design a practical and acceptable intervention to help primary schools adopt whole school approaches to food. This will be done in partnership with key people (stakeholders) including head teachers, teachers, staff, children, parents, school governors, local businesses, and local and national government, by: 1. Hosting stakeholders workshops in Bradford, Leeds, Newcastle and Belfast to discuss factors influencing what children eat during the school day. We will ask people to consider potential influencing factors at school (e.g. space needed to provide lunch), in the community (e.g. cultural influences on eating practices) and from wider society (e.g. government policies on free-school meals). We will encourage discussion on how these factors relate to each other and use this information to build a picture called a 'systems map', providing a richer understanding of the local and wider influences on children's food choice. The map may also help to identify parts of the system most likely to respond to intervention and whether adding an intervention in one part (e.g. a packed lunch policy) is likely to cause positive or negative adaptations in others (food eaten at home). 2. Inviting stakeholders to take part in designing an intervention. This will involve consideration of the factors identified in our system maps. Based on existing discussion with people who work in schools, we do not expect the intervention to involve excess paperwork or expense for schools. Instead, it might include visual resources (like websites or videos) to support schools to include children in decision making, and to improve the food environment. It could also consider changes to catering decisions or specific activities such as embedding catering staff more across the school, growing food in schools, teaching with food, avoiding using food as reward/or punishment, and consistent food messages. To ensure the intervention supports schools without excessive burden, acceptability and potential barriers will be a key consideration during development. Importantly, we will focus on developing an intervention that has the best chance of supporting those in greatest need. 3. Seeking feedback about our draft intervention ideas from our wider stakeholder group. We will share the draft with stakeholders and ask them to rate its acceptability and how easily they can be used by schools. A form will also be used for stakeholders to consider which parts of the intervention they feel can be applied across all schools and which may be less transferable. We will then make any required improvements before fully developing the intervention and its resources. Impact and dissemination: The intervention has the potential to improve dietary options extending beyond the school day. It is important that it is evaluated so that, if successful, it can become standard practice. We will therefore engage with key decision makers and advocates, including Public Health England, School Food Matters (a national organisation supporting schools) and the Department of Education. We will share our findings widely, including with schools, children and parents, and will develop plans to test its impact on food choice.

UK ENABLE Consortium vision, aims and objectives: Local government is uniquely placed to shape the environmental and social factors which fundamentally influence non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and thus our health and wellbeing. Our vision is for local government to consider the health of local populations in all policy and practice decisions and to have the best possible scientific evidence to support those decisions. We will test our vision by working with five different local authority (LA) based public health systems across the UK, learning what works best, and what can be useful for all LAs across the UK. Our consortium brings together academics, practitioners, policy makers and other stakeholders from across the UK in five centres in NE and SW England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales; each with different models of public health delivery. We will develop and test a process that embeds research capacity and expertise in LAs. Working closely with our partners in each LA, we will identify a current priority for improving the health and wellbeing and reducing inequalities of people living in that area. By building relationships between academics, practitioners and policy makers we will enable the LA to access and create new evidence that is relevant for decision making about the priority issue. Scientific rationale for the proposed research: Evidence-informed policy-making aims to improve decision making by using the best available research. Organisational and cultural barriers within the current system have made this approach difficult to achieve. New methods and approaches are needed which bring together researchers, practitioners and policy makers in local government, where evidence is only one contributing factor to decision-making. Embedded researchers and knowledge brokers can help to ensure evidence is used by building understanding of the context, accessing existing, and co-producing new evidence. Intervention(s) of interest and the potential applications and anticipated benefits of the work: By the end of the project we will: 1. Increase research capacity and 'no how' in each LA, focusing on a local NCD priority issue, enabling access to evidence to inform local decision-making. We will develop and share learning which is generalisable across the UK 2. Build and support new partnerships for active and effective research use with practitioners, policy makers, and academia 3. Build knowledge and skills in local government and universities to maximise use of different kinds of evidence for policy, practice and public decision-making 4. Co-create evidence that addresses local government priorities, with a focus on prevention, by working across sectors and disciplines, utilising novel methodological approaches, including complex systems models 5. Develop a range of health and system interventions that have been co-produced and tested across LA areas 6. Create sustained change in research culture in LAs and academia so that evidence use is embedded across local government 7. Evaluate this new approach and methods to see if we made a difference to the health of people living in each area, related to their priority topic, and whether/how this approach could be rolled out across the UK We anticipate that this work will improve population health and wellbeing and increase the use of scientific research. It aims to improve quality, efficiency and effectiveness of public health interventions and services, reduce waste, and improve staff morale and retention. Consortium management: Our across-UK academic leadership brings together experience of applied translational research in prevention from four of the UKCRC funded Centres of Excellence in Public Health. Senior leaders in local government public health, bring practical experience of putting evidence into action. Other members have expertise in systems thinking, embedded research, knowledge brokerage and other skills essential to our success.

Flooding has been identified by the government as the number one priority and risk to the UK. Flooding already causes millions of pounds worth of damage to people's homes, infrastructure and the economy every year, and is projected to become even more severe under climate change. Being able to plan for, respond to and manage flooding effectively is therefore essential. We are lucky to have a tradition of flood management in the UK led by the Environment Agency. Operational flood models use meteorological data combined with elevation data to show us where flooding will occur. These models produce flood risk maps for planning and forecasting purposes and have helped us design flood defences for many areas. However, flooding is not only dependent on the topography of an area. There are many other factors at play that evolve over time: culverts can get blocked, flood gates are left open and flood walls can fall into disrepair. This can dramatically alter the extent and depth of a flood. Not only that, but our exposure to flood risk changes too. Far less disruption occurs from a flood overnight than during rush hour traffic. A prime example of this is the flooding of Boscastle in 2004. During the event, 116 cars parked in a carpark were washed downstream, blocking a bridge, causing water to back up and flood unexpected areas. If the rain had fallen in the evening, the cars would not have been in the carpark and the impact of the flood would have been smaller. Could we have predicted this? Can we reduce the impact of flooding for similar future events? We think that with the right data and tools, we can. We will build a tool that will change how we respond to flood risks as they evolve. The tool will allow flood risk managers to deploy just-in-time maintenance and alleviation measures, such as clearing critical blocked culverts or setting up mobile flood defences. To achieve this, the tool will incorporate brand new types of data and cutting edge flood models into an easy-to-use online platform that allows users to visualise evolving flood risks. The platform (called PYRAMID) will be developed in conjunction with the Environment Agency, local authorities and community groups to ensure that it delivers relevant information for critical decision-making in near-real time. The platform will have toolkits to make it easy for communities to incorporate their data, providing essential local information. The new data driving this modelling will be key. The data that we need are available but sit fragmented across a range of organisations in difficult-to-use formats. We will use artificial intelligence to extract this useful information from hidden datasets, such as old reports, flood asset registers and various types of satellite imagery. In addition, we want to incorporate brand new information from novel sensors that are being deployed as part of Newcastle University's Urban Observatory. These sensors monitor things like soil moisture and rainfall at very high resolutions, as well as other factors like traffic and congestion. We can also monitor the condition of specific factors affecting flood risk, such as whether particular culverts are blocked or whether certain flood walls are in poor condition. These factors can be monitored by looking at a combination of satellite remote sensing and sensors deployed on lorries and other vehicles. We will also harness data collected communities and citizens. All of this information will be put into our flood models. We have a hyper-resolution hydrodynamic flood model that can accurately simulate the movement of debris in flood flows at a centimetre scale. This model will work in conjunction with a broader catchment model, which will provide information on the hydrological conditions in the wider area. The platform will be trialled in Newcastle to take advantage of existing government investments in the Urban Observatory and a legacy of flood research conducted here.