In order to (1) estimate whether BE improves outcomes for babies when compared to a group of mothers and babies who receive regular services and (2) explore how BE is being implemented in GM, we will carry out the following phases of work: 1. Development phase This will include the following activities: -Workshop with relevant stakeholders to map out the mechanisms of BE that create a change in child outcomes. This will inform our final research design and development of questionnaires. -Accessing ward level data and testing feasibility of ward level randomisation. This will be used to confirm the final design. -Recruit Assistant Psychologists and Volunteer Psychologists to support the research team. -Stakeholder engagement event in GM. -Set up Advisory Board. -Develop questionnaires for collecting child outcomes from mothers at around 12 months and online survey of health visitors. -Securing ethical approval from the National Research Ethics Service and the NHS, and R&D in each site to carry out the study and ensure that all mothers of interest will have sufficient information about the study to sign informed consent to participate in our study. This will require final versions of questionnaires and materials. -Pilot questionnaire. 2. Baby Express evaluation Mothers-to-be who present for their 36-week midwife appointment will be identified and recruited into our study by midwives and the assistant psychologists. The outcome measures will be collected during a face-to-face interview when children are 12-14 months old by NatCen interviewers. If needed, we will also collect outcome data from a cohort of mothers in the BE wards and control wards whose infants were born before BE was introduced to enable us to adjust our analysis for any individual level differences between the BE and control wards. Their outcomes will be measured in much the same way as those in the trial. We will also seek access to information about mothers' 'antenatal pathway factors' during pregnancy from the data collected as part of the Maternity Pathway Maternity Tariff Payment by Results system. This would include mothers in the BE and control areas as well as in two pre-BE cohorts. Our approach to data analysis will be determined by whether it has been possible to randomise wards into BE and control groups. Ideally, we will compare the post-BE outcomes in BE wards with those in control wards while taking into account clustering at the ward level. 3. Health Visitor survey We propose to gather the views and experiences of those involved in the delivery of the BE activities such as health visitors. The specific questions to be addressed will be developed in the initial stages of the project but overall, we aim explore: -How practitioners adhered to, adapted, dropped, or altered BE delivery? -What are the key contextual or supporting enablers and constraints in delivering BE successfully? -What worked and didn't work in delivering BE? -What is their overall perception of the value of BE and how well implementation is going? -Whether/how initial delivery intentions are being realised in current operations? -What are the challenges they have faced? -How have these challenges been addressed? The survey will be analysed using descriptive statistics, reported in charts and tables, and used to interpret and contextualise the impact findings from the BE trial described above. 4. Dissemination Our dissemination plan will be agreed at the start of the project. The activities will include public engagement opportunities at various stages of our project and publications targeted at key practitioner audiences, peer-reviewed journals, seminars/conferences and other events and through media.

Our overarching research question is: How might prevention of risk factors causing Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) be considered and fully incorporated into urban planning and development in the UK? Context: Poor quality urban environments are important contributors to Non-Communicable Diseases such as lung and heart disease, diabetes and mental health problems. This is because they are associated with critical risk factors - including air pollution, noise, lack of physical activity, lack of green space, and obesity. Therefore, one way of preventing these future major chronic health problems is to go "upstream" and improve the urban environment so that it encourages healthy behaviours and reduces adverse risks. However, urban planning and development is a complex system of actors and processes operating over multiple layers of governance. . The driving force in urban planning and development are now the large private sector actors, particularly landowners, investors and developers. Narrow valuation mechanisms and short-term horizons are a central challenge as they do not factor in long-term health. Urban planning faces "super wicked" problems too - where "those who are in the best position to address the problem are not only those who caused it, but also those with the least immediate incentive to act". Researching these complex systems requires: consideration of whole and interconnected systems; clear visualisation and analysis; effective engagement and 'co-production' with a wide range of stakeholders, including public, private, third sector as well academia and the lay public. Applications: We aim to transform urban planning and development systems so that health and health inequalities are valued and integrated at each of the main roots of core decision-making. We will develop with urban development decision-makers at city, combined authority and national level interventions and methods for realigning the system for healthier public and private sector operations. The intervention has three components: evidence of health impact including economic valuation; opportunities for change; community-led creative arts media communicating health inequalities. We will identify the best leverage points for introducing the intervention. We anticipate a range of applications for the evidence and associated tools. They will provide measurable evidence of health impacts to be used in multiple ways including: local and national planning policy; local development management and planning permissions; cost-benefit analysis on infrastructure and other investment decision-making; and policy or legal mechanisms for re-aligning corporate governance towards long-term health outcomes. For example, we will seek to influence and introduce evidence on health impacts of urban planning into the Housing and Economic Land Availability Assessment, which determines what land is to be developed. Beneficiaries: The beneficiaries of this kind of whole system approach include: a) decision-makers by improving the quality of what they offer (e.g. local government will benefit politically by evidencing societal benefit; progressive investors and developers gain commercially by differentiating their 'product'); b) in the medium to longer term, urban and rural populations should be positively affected by better urban environments (e.g. reduced air pollution, better quality green infrastructure, improved physical environment); and c) taxpayers and central government over the long term due to decreased health burden on the NHS and increased levels of productivity.

Urban environments are home to the majority of people on the planet and so ensuring these systems provide healthy, productive and resilient environments is critical. Green infrastructure - which we define as a network of multi-functional green space and other green features - is a key component of urban systems and the main reservoirs of much urban biodiversity. But how do we manage green infrastructure to maximise the benefits these features bring to humans and wider ecosystem functioning? Here we focus on gaining a better predictive understanding of diversity associated with green infrastructure can be optimised to enhance ecosystem services. Biodiversity is widely recognised to be a key driver of multiple ecosystem functions (i.e. ecosystem multifunctionality), underpinning the provision of numerous ecosystem services for humanity, as well as undesirable disservices. Manipulation of biodiversity therefore has considerable potential to significantly improve how we construct and manage engineered and urban ecosystems. A major gap in knowledge hampering our ability to harness the benefits of biodiversity in urban areas is understanding how attributes particular to green infrastructure in urban environments affect biodiversity-ecosystem multifunctionality relationships. This knowledge is important for the design and management of urban green infrastructure to maximise ecosystem service provision in wider urban landscapes. Moreover, the mechanisms by which landscape form and biodiversity influence ecosystem services and mitigate against disservices operate at different scales, and we lack understanding of how these mechanisms operate and scale in urban landscapes. A further gap in knowledge is how the diversity of urban forms interact with the diversity of neighbouring peri-urban and rural forms to affect ecosystem services and disservices in urban landscapes. Here we address these gaps in knowledge to understand how biodiversity can be used to enhance ecosystem multifunctionality in urban landscapes at contrasting scales. We focus on ecosystem services of carbon capture, cycling and storage, urban cooling, and water holding capacity, and disservices of greenhouse gas emissions, pathogen prevalence, and tick-borne pathogens; these services and disservices are intrinsically linked to green infrastructure and there is an established mechanistic basis for a link to biodiversity. We will integrate knowledge of biodiversity-ecosystem multifunctionality relationships into a modelling framework that will be used to create a web-based planning tool to determine how planning scenarios affect urban ecosystem multifunctionality. Our findings will contribute to the development of enabling mechanisms, with a focus on urban land use and green infrastructure planning, to enhance the contribution made by local scale green infrastructure interventions to wider landscape scale processes and the resilience of urban ecosystems.

Some parts of the UK have persistently higher unemployment rates than others - Figure 1 in the Case for Support shows the unemployment rate in 2011 and 1981 in the largest cities. Although some parts of the South perform poorly and some parts of the North perform well, it is remarkable how marked is the 'North-South' divide in the level and persistence of unemployment. It is often argued that migration is the main force that would be expected to equalize economic opportunity across areas - with people moving from disadvantaged to more advantaged areas thus reducing the competition for jobs in high unemployment areas and increasing it in low unemployment areas. According to this view, the persistence in unemployment is primarily caused by a weak migration response and that the solution to the North-South divide is policies to increase migration rates. But in fact, the migration response in the UK is quite strong -Figure 2 in the Case for Support shows that areas with a poorly performing labour market in 1981 had significantly lower subsequent population growth than areas with relatively low unemployment in 1981. Putting these two pieces of information based on Figures 1 and 2 together makes it clear that migration is failing to equalize economic opportunity across areas and we need a better understanding of why. This project aims to do just that. First, it may be that migration alters the mix of the population in the area moved out of and not in a way that improves the economic prospects of those who are left behind. For example, it may be that more educated individuals are more mobile geographically so that migration from deprived areas acts to depress the skill base there. Our project will use Understanding Society, its predecessor (the British Household Panel Survey) and the Birth Cohort Studies to investigate how individual migration decisions respond to economic opportunity and how this responsiveness varies across different types of individuals. Using the Birth Cohort Studies with their very detailed information on both educational attainment and on non-cognitive skills, we will be able to provide much better evidence of the types of people who move in response to economic opportunity e.g. are more 'dynamic' individuals more mobile as is sometimes claimed? Secondly, it may be that whilst individuals facing economic hardship are more likely to move out of an area, they may nevertheless be compelled to return to the support of their wider family who may live in an area with no greater economic opportunity than the one they moved out of. Using our data sets one can also investigate the destinations of those who move because of economic shocks. Finally, the project will also help us to understand the channels by which economic opportunity affects migration decisions. Much discussion assumes it is directly through the labour market. But it is possible that economic shocks to an area cause a deterioration in non-economic aspects of the neighbourhood e.g. because of a rise in crime or a fall in the level of amenities offered. Using the reasons for moving and questions about satisfaction with neighbourhood in Understanding Society and the BHPS the project will disentangle the economic and non-economic channels. The project will lead to academic research papers to publish in leading peer-reviewed journals. But we also hope to influence the debate around regional policy and how regional inequalities can be reduced. We will write accessible summaries for more popular outlets such as the CEP's Centrepiece magazine and the LSE Public Policy blogs. We will work with our non-academic partners to disseminate the research widely across the country. We will engage with stakeholders through our partners Manchester New Economy and RBS and use the conduit of the What Works Centre, (a partnership between the LSE, government departments, ARUP and the Centre for Cities) as a vehicle for disemmination.

The purpose of this research is to provide an assessment of evidence and tools available to implement nature-based solutions (NBS) to address future flood risk in the UK in order to build the resilience of the UK's people, economy and infrastructure to climate change. It will do so through three main phases. Firstly, we will map the existing state of the environmental evidence base that UK practitioners can draw on with respect to climate projections and nature-based solutions to address fluvial, pluvial and coastal flood risk. This shall be done in a way that recognises the co-benefits of these measures and how they can be used within a holistic flood risk management approach. Secondly, we will address the usability of existing evidence amongst the practitioner community in order to isolate evidence gaps and good practice with regard to NBS evidence. Thirdly, the project will bring together a researcher and policy community around NBS in order to propose novel means of implementing UK commitments on climate resilience in light of key social and economic challenges and communicate this in a range of different formats. Our engagements with the policy and research communities will occur around a variety of fora. Firstly, through desk-based research, we will seek to understand the current range of evidence relating to NBS in the UK around the themes of: (1) understanding the evidence required for the implementation of NBS, such as new climate projections at different scales; (2) understanding the available data on the effectiveness of NBS from both the natural and social sciences; and (3) understanding the opportunities for, and barriers to, implementing NBS relating to the current evidence base and available climate change projections. Secondly we will undertake research with key researchers in the field through workshops in order to co-identify areas of research evidence opportunities and gaps. Once the evidence landscape has been mapped out, we will work with regional practitioners in Greater Manchester in order to understand the extent to which exiting policy and evidence is usable in meeting their aims of building climate resilience. Greater Manchester is a good case study in this regard due to the policy commitments relating to building the resilience of the city and also the range of funded projects that are currently being undertaken to support the implementation of NBS. This includes the EU Life + Natural Course Project, the H2020 funded Green Cities for Climate and Water Resilience, Sustainable Economic Growth, Healthy Citizens and Environments (Grow Green), and GM's selection as a Defra Urban Pioneer. Whilst we recognise the limits to generalisability from focussing on the experiences of Greater Manchester, the work should isolate useful insights, particularly for practitioners working at city and regional level, with the opportunity to understand some of the issues around the impact (or potential impact) of the devolution agenda and potential loss of funding from European sources after Brexit. The project will therefore target different research and policy communities in a variety of ways in order to develop a systematic overview of the challenges and opportunities facing the UK in terms of utilising existing evidence bases to facilitate the implementation of NBS to address future flood risk. The various outputs that will support this include an evidence database, policy briefs targeted at different types of practitioners, and reports on evidence gaps and good practice in making research useful to practitioners in light of revised UK climate projections.