Growing numbers of people across the world live with impairments. Medical and technological advances mean that babies and children with impairments are more likely to survive into adulthood, adults are more likely to survive accidents and diseases that would previously have killed them, and more people are living to old age, but often with long-term conditions and impairments. At the same time, financial constraints on governments mean that emphasis is being put on family members and friends ('carers') to provide the support that disabled and older people need to help them live independently. The UK has carried out a range of surveys of impairment, disability and carers since the mid-1980s that have helped policy makers understand how many people need and provide support and these have provided organisations with 'ammunition' to help them campaign for change. The information from the latest in these series of surveys - the Life Opportunities Survey (LOS) and the Survey of Carers in Households (SCH) - has recently become available and offers an important opportunity to explore new and emerging patterns of impairment, disability and caring. The LOS is exciting because it is the first survey to explore how the environment in which people live (housing, transport, other people's attitudes and so on) influences whether or not their impairments become disabilities. In doing this, it has responded to the criticisms of earlier surveys that disabled people and their organisations made. These criticisms pointed out that it is often the environment that people live in and the support services they have access to that turn an impairment into a disability. The LOS also collects information about everyone in a household, so we can also explore whether disabled people and other people in their household experience similar barriers to participation in society. The survey covers both children and young people (from the age of 11) and adults of all ages. The Survey of Carers in Households is important because it seems to show that the population of carers has changed since the mid-1980s, with more people providing care when they themselves are well into older age. Our work will: - explore how patterns of impairment, disability and caring have changed over time; - look at how disabled people and those who live with them experience barriers to participating in society; - explore whether disabled people who live in more deprived areas or in the countryside experience different sorts and sizes of barriers to other disabled people. We will do this by using data from the two surveys and carrying out different statistical tests that will allow us to tease out all the different factors that might affect the experience of being disabled or being a carer. As we do the project, we will be using senior researchers who have experience of this sort of work to train and 'bring on' the next generation of researchers. We will have three partners in our project - SCOPE, an organisation of and for disabled people; Carers UK, an organisation of and for carers; and the Department of Work and Pensions, the English government department with lead responsibility for policy about older and disabled people. These partners will choose detailed questions that we will explore in our work. They will also help us to bring the findings from our work to other organisations and groups who will find them helpful. At the end of the project, we will write reports of the different parts of the work, and will also write a four page summary, in everyday language, so that we can share our findings with as wide a range of disabled people, carers and the wider public as possible. We will write articles for professionals who work with disabled people and carers, as well as for other researchers. Finally, we will run a workshop where we can share our findings face-to-face with others who can use them in their work and campaigning.

The UK is currently in the midst of sweeping changes to both state pension provision and private pension arrangements. Recent policy reforms include the introduction of the 'new state pension' from April 2016, further increases in the state pension age and the introduction of 'auto-enrolment' into workplace pensions. These changes are happening against a backdrop of continuing long-term trends, including a decline in the generosity of many employer-provided pensions and increasing life expectancies. These trends and policy reforms have significant implications for households' saving and retirement decisions. In very general terms, the environment is one in which accumulating resources to finance retirement is increasingly important, but the responsibility for ensuring such accumulation happens is shifting ever more to the individual as the state and employers take a step back. We propose a programme of research that will study the implications of this changing environment and recent policy reforms for household behaviour and well-being. Our two central sets of research questions are: 1) Are working-age households saving appropriately for retirement? What will be the likely standards of living in retirement of successive generations of pensioners? 2) What are the likely long-run impacts of recent reforms and other long run trends on household saving and retirement decisions? Different cohorts of individuals (those born in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s) have faced very different incentives to save privately for retirement (and to do so in different types of assets), and will face different incentives to retire as they approach what would traditionally have been the end of working life. This had led to considerable policy concern that while those recently retired have, on average, done so with relatively high levels of resources, those currently in working life are not saving enough for their retirement. We aim to add considerably to the evidence base available for policy makers by exploring what can be known now about the future retirement living standards of currently working age households. We will do this by using the best available data on the decisions that these cohorts have already made, taking into account their past earnings and the structure of state and private pensions that they face, to estimate their future behaviour. We will then consider how their likely retirement standards of living will compare to those enjoyed during working life and to absolute thresholds of poverty in order to assess the 'appropriateness' of the household saving. An important feature of our research will be to study how this differs across different cohorts, given the different incentives they have faced and will face in future. We will also analyse separately the impact of various changes to the pensions and savings environment - including specific policy reforms - on household saving and retirement behaviour, and consequently on households' resources. This will allow us to assess the impact of these changes on standards of living in retirement. The trends and policy changes whose effects we propose to consider are: the declining prevalence of some employer-provided pensions, increases in the state pension age, the introduction of the new state pension, changes in annuity prices, and the financial incentives to save encompassed in 'auto-enrolment'. Such analysis is of considerable importance for policy makers. Understanding the long-run impact of recent, extremely large policy reforms on households' behaviour and living standards is vital for any assessment of a policy's effectiveness at meeting its objectives. Furthermore, greater understanding of the impact of some long-running changes in the pensions and saving environment is needed to better understand which (if any) future policy reforms may be desirable.

Design practices and methods, and professional designers, are increasingly visible in public policy processes in national, regional and local government as well as in broader policy ecosystems in particular public service design. The outcomes, consequences and implications of this development are as yet little discussed. In design research, and in political science, recent research has attempted to bridge this divide with nascent research communities in the form of special interest groups and conference panels. This 18-month network brings together these two academic constituencies in a systematic way to identify the tensions and resistances between the two domains, identify potential where capacities of design can be more effectively leveraged, and map out an agenda for future research and knowledge exchange. The network complements other initiatives in academia and practice by critically examining the concepts and methodologies at the intersection of design and political science, as well as identifying untapped potential for using design in public policy. By building capacity across and within these research communities, alongside practice, new understandings as well as new projects can be developed. This is relevant and timely as social and public policy issues require new forms of public administration practice, changes to institution design, ways of engaging with publics and forms of democratic debate. Over 31 people including established researchers, ECRs and PhD students, as well as practitioners working in government departments, think tanks, consultancies and civil society organisations, have expressed interest in being part of the network. Organised through 4 interactive workshops (two in London at UAL, two at Manchester, both blended to allow face to face and online participation), the network will also exist through threaded online discussion on digital platform Slack. Through invited provocations at three workshops with leading researchers and practitioners (with video and transcripts made available on a blog), alongside creative, participatory activities, the network will consolidate and articulate a shared understanding of the potential, consequences and implications for design in public policy processes, informed by research in several fields (design research, the humanities, political science and policy studies). A fourth workshop will allow the network to synthesise understanding of key debates and also to sketch out designs for future collaborative research projects. These insights will form the basis of a public report co-authored by the PI, CI and Steering Group and materials for a public blog to disseminate findings to academics and practitioners. Finally through two events, one aimed at the UK Civil Service co-organised with Policy Lab and Department of Work and Pensions, and one public event, co-organised with the Policy Institute at King's, key findings and directions for future research and knowledge exchange will be disseminated. The network organisers anticipate that members, including the steering group, will build on the outcomes to collaboratively craft new, cross-disciplinary research projects (e.g. for UKRI or Horizon Europe), as well as continuing dialogue through scholarly communities, as well as via fora such as Slack.

In recent years, the trust that society places in opaque centralised mechanisms run by government, network operators, and financial institutions has been eroding, with various events (e.g., the financial meltdown of 2007 and the hack of the DigiNotar certificate authority) illustrating that high integrity cannot be achieved merely through trust in one or a handful of parties. As a reaction to this erosion in trust, two alternative architectures have emerged: users have either flocked to systems that have no central point of trust; or they have increased pressure on central entities to provide more openness and visibility. In both of these settings, the main technique that has emerged to provide these properties is a distributed ledger; i.e., a list of events that have occurred within a given system that is created and stored by a distributed or even decentralised set of parties. Storing such ledgers in a distributed and transparent manner allows these systems to achieve full public auditability, in which any user can check for themselves that the system is functioning correctly. Given the potential applications of distributed ledgers, one might be tempted to use a single approach as a way to provide auditability or distribute trust. Requirements in one setting may be very different from those in another, however, so one approach cannot be indiscriminately applied. As an example, SSL certificates are public, so their issuance can be stored on a public ledger. On the other end of the spectrum, systems such as financial settlement, supply chains, and personal identity management all deal with highly sensitive data that cannot be included as-is in a globally visible ledger. Balancing these application-specific requirements with both the benefits and limitations of distributed ledgers is the main focus of our research. To understand the requirements in each of the settings mentioned above, our research will be conducted with five user partners: the Bank of England, which is interested in using distributed ledgers for financial settlement; the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), which is interested in the provision of benefits; the Robin Hood Fund, which is interested in allowing for the trading of entitlements to the fund; Provenance, which is interested in transparency in supply chain certification; and the Google Certificate Transparency team, which is already using distributed ledgers to log the issuance of SSL certificates. Each of these user partners will give us insight into a different potential application of distributed ledgers, and by constructing technical solutions that meet their diverse requirements (e.g., the need for privacy or scalability), we can impact their eventual deployments of these technologies.