This 44-month project will establish "LPIP Strategic Co-ordination Hub - What Works Centre for Place" as the Local Policy Innovation Partnership (LPIP) Strategic Co-ordination Hub. This will involve bringing together a network of people/organisations who have successfully delivered on place partnerships, engagement, impact, and translational research. The Hub is a national consortium, led by the University of Birmingham, convening stakeholders across the research and policy ecosystem. It is concerned with drawing together understanding of local challenges, and formulating solutions, across the UK through an innovative and effective service-driven approach to place-based policy making and public service delivery. It is designed to lead to a step-change in the quality and impact of the evidence created by universities and their local place partners. Our approach is based on extending and accelerating learning UK-wide from the successful and highly regarded place-based West Midlands Regional Economic Development Institute (WMREDI) partnership. The delivery team will be led by a leadership team, comprising staff from the University of Birmingham, the University of the West of England and Inner Circle Consulting (non-academic Co-Investigator) and a wider network team of 13 delivery partners (a mix of academics and non-academics from different geographical areas and with contrasting thematic specialisms) with a track record of rigorous high-quality engaged research relevant to local policy and practice. The Hub will work with local LPIPs and partnership communities in their places, embedding co-design and co-production. It will develop a programme of capacity-building activities looking at the thematic challenges places face and what works in place partnerships. It will respond to the needs of LPIPs and government. An Advisory Board made up of government and the wider place ecosystem partners and research assets will champion and guide the delivery of the Hive and the broader LPIP programme, as well as peer reviewing applications for funding from the Hub. The Hub will: - Tackle the gap in linking the 'local' with the 'national' in policy development by linking with policy makers at different geographical scales and across policy domains. - Model and scale up innovative and effective practice and deepen the collective knowledge base, so cultivating common purpose and collective intelligence in meeting the needs of places in all parts of the UK. - Act as a front door to national policy stakeholders - Use a 'service' mindset, which starts from the needs of users and designs products and services with their active involvement. - Use a careful balance of intellectual ambition (curiosity to understand what works) with engagement expertise to create the conditions for purposeful partnership working across different constituencies, including LPIP teams, policy makers, researchers, and citizens. - Provide training, secondment and learning opportunities. - Assess the transferability of methods and findings across the LPIP network (and beyond). The Hub will be successful if it has helped shape and grow a thriving place ecosystem that is: - addressing the challenge of making local places 'successful'; and where - government (nationally and sub-nationally) is working with the Hub to share data and enhance policy approaches to take account of place needs; and - UKRI and stakeholders see the LPIP programme pathway as an effective way of expanding place-based activities and programmes.

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.

Recovery is "the process of rebuilding, restoring and rehabilitating the community following an emergency" (HMG Emergency Response and Recovery, 2013). For COVID-19, recovery will involve all-of society (because everyone in the country has been affected to some extent) and whole-system (because every organisation, service and function has been affected). Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic we have deployed our research expertise in emergency response and recovery to support government. This has involved providing ongoing information about recovery, producing rapid response guides on aspects of response and recovery, and identifying opportunities for research to support the recovery effort. This project builds on this initial work to understand how government develop plans for short-term, transactional 'recovery' and how they think strategically about longer-term, ambitious, transformational change which we call 'renewal'. Objective: This project works closely with resilience partners in three Local Resilience Forums (LRFs) to develop a generalizable, theoretically underpinned framework for how recovery and renewal to COVID-19 can enhance resilience. The framework will: - Take a whole system approach to recovery and renewal (from communities to national levels) - Explore how to manage the changes in people, places and processes that is needed to live with COVID-19 - Address short-term, transactional recovery as well as longer-term, transformational renewal - Complement existing guidance and resilience standards and inform an international standard that we will write on recovery and renewal Approach: The framework will be informed by (and inform) Recovery Coordination Groups (RCGs) by using an action research approach to work closely with the resilience partners and engage with local and national organisations on how they plan recovery and renewal on a system-wide basis. Our partner LRFs have different structures (e.g. for local governance and recovery governance) and characteristics (e.g. partnerships, priorities, populations, local challenges, inequalities) so we can create a framework that is widely applicable to local variations. Activities: We will: - Collect and analyse national/international lessons on recovery and renewal - Gather primary data by interviewing experts across the world on emergency planning, risk, and resilience - Contribute to three Recovery Coordination Groups (RCGs) as well as three specific renewal projects (e.g. on volunteering, community resilience, demand management in emergency services) - Extensively engage with other local and national government organisations to ensure alignment of our framework and exploit ongoing opportunities for impact - Facilitate webinars and training on recovery and renewal for resilience - Develop and test a framework for recovery and renewal, refine it in different contexts (national and international), learn about its application, and use feedback to improve it - Develop and test a methodology to assess the impact of the framework Main deliverables: - A searchable database of lessons for recovery and renewal for local resilience - Expert briefings on how to implement recovery and renewal for resilience - A generalizable, theoretically underpinned, practice-tested framework to support government's thinking about recovery and renewal for resilience - A self-evaluation methodology to reflect on recovery practices - Publish fortnightly 'The Manchester Briefing on Recovery and Renewal' currently distributed directly (and through a network of national/international partners) to 52,000 people along with case studies and training products - International and national standards having a global impact

Public procurement is firmly in the spotlight in the Covid-19 crisis. Local authorities (LAs) spend around £100bn (or 47% of their total budget) annually on procurement (IoG,2018). In the Covid-19 crisis, it is crucial that this money delivers the maximum benefit for communities - whether providing for public health (including testing-tracking-tracing responsibilities), for social care (including care home provision), or as one of the key economic levers through which the local economy is to be restarted. Ineffective procurement arrangements present risks for the delivery/continuity of public services in the crisis. Where rapid scaling-up of services is necessary, the limits of some LAs' capacities (and their supply-chains) are often being tested as costs, staff and supply shortages increase. LAs must simultaneously act to protect essential supply-chains where demand has collapsed (e.g. transport, facilities management). Such challenges require smart and agile procurement responses to build strong, effective and efficient relationships and generate positive impacts for local communities. This study will investigate these urgent issues, and how gains might be achieved in the response to Covid-19. The team will examine emerging opportunities to maximise the impact of, and leverage additional value from LA procurement. With extensive involvement and support from key stakeholders, this project will examine what is working well, less well, why, and with what effects and implications. It asks how, and how effectively, are LAs using procurement to address the challenges posed by Covid-19? What are the successes to be celebrated? Where are the tensions that need to be managed? Where is the system at risk of breaking down? What opportunities are there for improved procurement performance? The project will encourage reflection on the ability of the 'procurement ecosystem' to respond in a crisis; clarifying critical-success-factors and pressure-points and discussing what to do next. The project will seek to identify potential leverage from an accumulation of 'positive-sum' gains. Reports here identify a long list of such potential gains, resulting from strategic, entrepreneurial and, particularly, relational approaches that strengthen the system and promote resilience. In the absence of these approaches the system may still operate - but at risk of being substantially underpowered. Impact from the study will derive from important project findings regarding effective crisis strategies; effective 'workarounds' to maintain safety, continuity and resilience (including creative commissioning processes, using the flexibility in existing procurement legislation, and combining complementary capabilities amongst supply-chain partners); and effective ways in which trust, openness and collaboration are emerging to drive innovative ways to aggregate and channel resources.