In England, a fifth of all households live in the private rented sector. Recent exploratory research in England has identified a 'shadow' private rented sector where activities such as landlord fraud, letting property not designed as residential accommodation, threatening behaviour and violent illegal eviction are commonplace. Tenants at the very bottom end of the rented sector are vulnerable as a consequence of poverty, may well have experiences of street homelessness and/or 'sofa-surfing' that reflect and cause mental health issues, and may have an uncertain migrant status and 'no recourse to public funds' and so are reliant on precarious housing and may be unwilling to engage with statutory authorities. Furthermore, there is evidence that the private rented sector is a site for organised criminal activity including human trafficking, modern slavery and cannabis cultivation. In response to this challenging landscape, the proposed study will: - Undertake a systematic examination of criminal landlord behaviour and links to other criminal activity; - Work with local authorities and the police across Yorkshire and the Humber to explore effective interventions to disrupt criminal behaviours and effect successful prosecutions; - Establish the number of prosecutions for different types of landlord-related crime, examine the obstacles to prosecution; and consider how decisions are made about sentencing; and - Work co-productively with the victims of landlord crime and with third sector organisations to arrive at a better understand of how this type of crime is experienced and the kinds of support that charitable and statutory authorities should seek to develop. The project will bring together academics working in housing, housing enforcement, crime and policing interventions and housing-related prosecutions, across the Universities of York, Sheffield and Teesside. The research will be based in Yorkshire and the Humber and work with local authorities and police forces across four regional districts, as well as a Yorkshire-based housing charity. Elements of the research will be co-productive: that is, academics will work with practitioners within local authorities, the police and the criminal justice system. The study will also use co-production methods to work with victimized tenants to explore their experiences and define routes by which their narratives can be presented to relevant stakeholder audiences to help shape best practice guidance. The research aims to ensure that findings and recommendations are relevant and lead directly to improved policing interventions. Project advisory group members will include senior civil servants, relevant professional bodies and training agencies, and from the outset the project will explore ways to ensure that learning is disseminated nationally.

Police officers are public-facing professionals. This means they operate in the public eye with at times dramatic repercussions for their private lives (e.g., 'trial by social media', unwanted identification, online harassment and threats to themselves or their families). While this is often framed as a way to 'redress police injustices' or as a democratising potential of 'watching back', it threatens officers' social standing as well as mental and physical health outside of their professional role. Their loved ones (spouses, children, other close family members) are involved directly and immediately, either because they are also targeted or because they have to live with fears and accept restrictions to their online participation in order to safeguard their police family members. Due to this, public-facing professionals police personnel (LPFPs) and their dependents clearly face strong challenges and risks to their rights and opportunities as citizens online. 3PO takes the unusual and pioneering step to re-focus the theme of protecting citizens online to the law enforcement domain, which is often treated as the one 'citizens need protection from'. However, at present neither the extent of online risks for officers, let alone their dependents, is known nor do credible plans exists for safeguarding this citizen group online. The 3PO project will address these gaps through a user-centred approach that will deliver a series of targeted outcomes. Firstly, 3PO will create in-depth knowledge about the extent, nature, drivers, mechanisms and consequences of online risks and harms for LPFPs and their dependents. This will lead to important refinements in current understandings of privacy and consent as collective concepts that need to be negotiated in (family/professional) groups and create a taxonomy of LPFP-specific online risks and harms. A major focus will be on the co-creation of three user-focused tools for LPFPs and dependents for reactive and proactive protection: (1) a Harm Reporting Application for LPFPs and/or their dependents to report incidents, problematic events or concerns to instigate support and protection measures, (2) a Vulnerability Assessment ("self-check") App to assess their own online presence and account settings to identify potential risks, (3) an AI-based harm mitigation and risk assessment platform for police organisations consisting of AI-based analysis capabilities and a dashboard for the visualisation of reactive analysis and proactive monitoring of individual and organisational harm profiles. Thirdly, 3PO will produce design and policy recommendations and specialised police training and awareness campaigns. The project will do so by utilising a highly experienced consortium of applied and policy researchers from Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, UCL and Napier led by the globally connected security research Centre of Excellence in Terrorism, Resilience, Intelligence and Organised Crime Research (CENTRIC) at Sheffield Hallam University. To guarantee outcomes are co-developed with and fully pertinent for our target group, 3PO comprises six UK police forces (Metropolitan Police, Police Scotland, Police Service Northern Ireland, South Yorkshire Police, Lancashire Police, Humberside Police) and the Home Office as active research partners. 3PO results will benefit societal groups outside police and law enforcement, as knowledge and products transfer to other public-facing professions faced with the same challenge such politicians, teachers, emergency services, NHS staff, journalists, amongst others. Hence, 3PO's results and products will be relevant for a large number of groups crucial for societal functioning and resilience.

Governments across the world have become increasingly aware of the social and economic problems caused by inequality. It's not just income inequality that is cause for concern but how different aspects of inequality-in health, education, employment and crime-combine to impoverish particular groups, and deepen divisions in society. For certain types of inequality, Scotland fares worse than comparable countries, particularly with respect to suicide, homicide, overcrowding and children living in poverty. As a result, the Scottish Government has launched a national strategy to create a 'Fairer Scotland'. For this initiative to be successful, however, it needs to have solid evidence which is based on a well-informed understanding of how the different dimensions of inequality interact and change over time. Our goal in this project is to achieve a step change in the quality and usefulness of the evidence base in Scotland by developing world-leading advances in how the multi-dimensional nature of inequality is understood. Working closely with policy makers at local and national level, we aim to support, guide and inform government policies with a view to achieving a genuine reduction in social inequalities. Our project is called AMMISS: Analysing Multi-Dimensional and Multi-Scale Inequalities in Scottish Society. It represents an ambitious and innovative research programme that will explore the causes and consequences of social inequalities in Scottish society in a much deeper and more joined-up way than has been achieved before. It is 'multi-dimensional' because we will explore multiple forms of inequality (e.g. poor health, low educational achievement, exposure to crime, failure to access the labour market, poor social mobility). Developing cutting-edge analysis we shall help policy makers understand how these different dimensions interact to affect life chances. It is 'multi-scale' because looking at inequality for a single level of geography or social unit can lead to a distorted understanding of inequality. So it is particularly important that we understand how inequalities impact at different levels both spatially (e.g. communities and cities) and socially (e.g. individuals and families). Our novel approach will allow us to analyse the causes and effects of multi-dimensional and multi-scale inequalities in a truly joined-up way, taking full advantage of Scotland's world-class administrative and survey data. AMMISS has two main themes. First, we will explore the way in which the neighbourhoods impact on how people experience inequalities and how changing patterns of poverty in Scottish cities impact on those experiences; for example, by affecting access to the labour market and exposure to crime. We will also examine how changing ethnic mix affects educational achievement and experiences of victimisation. Second, we will investigate how inequality impacts individuals over the course of their lives; for example, how experiences in early childhood affect social inequalities experienced later in life. We will also explore why some 'high risk' people and neighbourhoods remain 'resilient' to social inequalities, achieving positive outcomes against the odds. To make sense of such a broad range of issues we have brought together an impressive group of internationally recognised experts from various different areas of research. This will allow us to develop the innovative and insightful research needed to tackle inequality. Working closely with a range of organisations across Scotland, including central and local government and charities, will provide many opportunities for innovation and ensure that our work is relevant and useful for achieving a fairer society. Our ambition is to help those in positions of influence achieve real change. By making Scotland an exemplar for inequalities research, our work has the potential to influence and inspire policies to reduce social inequality around the world.