Cities compete with each other. For more than fifty years, Public Choice Theory has explored the notion that cities compete to attract and retain residents and businesses. Likewise, the Public Finance & Tax Competition literature identifies competition between cities on tax-and-spend policies. The evidence base suggests 'inter-city competition increases the likelihood cities will pursue a limited strategy versus a balanced or more progressive approach'. In the transport sector, fiscal demand management policies such as road user charging, workplace parking levies and parking charges are therefore issues upon which cities may compete. Both residents and businesses are deeply concerned about the implications of changes to charging regimes. The negative impacts they foresee may in turn influence not only transport decisions, but also (in the long run) location decisions. Thus, there are indirect impacts on the local economy, which provides a stimulus for inter-city competition. Buchan (2008), reviewing policies to combat climate change impacts from transport, concluded that a nationally-imposed parking charge on new developments was necessary, in order 'to avoid local authority fears of destructive competition from neighbouring authorities'. Fiscal management of transport demand is therefore a clear potential source of competition between cities, yet there is little research to guide us on how strong this competition might be, how much of the competitive pressure is real or perceived, and how it should affect the design, implementation and overall effectiveness of fiscal demand management policies. Our research will study the issues surrounding the design and implementation of parking and charging policies looking more specifically at competing cities with the aim to answer the following policy questions :- In what ways do and could cities compete using fiscal demand management policies? How should cities design their policies to achieve individual and collective 'best' outcomes? Should cities consider sharing revenue streams - should they compete or co-operate? How significant are these policies to the redistribution of business and residents between cities? What, if any, implications do the results have for the co-ordination of demand management policies?The research will be based on a mix of in-depth interviews with selected cities and mathematical models of competition between cities covering both short term and long term dynamics and behaviour of relevant stakeholders.

The publication of the Beveridge Report in 1942, and the subsequent establishment of comprehensive welfare services in the UK, was referred to as 'a revolutionary moment'. The same term has been used to describe the current context in which welfare services are being dismantled in England. At these two transformational moments, fundamental questions have been raised about the respective roles and responsibilities of the state and the voluntary and community sector (VCS) in welfare services provision. During the 1st revolutionary moment (1940s) the Beveridge report proposed a series of measures to address the 'evils' of the time. The subsequent restructuring of welfare provision led to significant changes in the structure and focus of many VCS organisations, and a period of intense debate about the nature and extent of the voluntary action. In our current 'revolutionary moment' as a result of major national and international events the role of the VCS as a welfare service provider has intensified despite severe cuts to funding. A fundamental renegotiation of the role of the state is underway; we are entering a period of intense debate about the nature and extent of voluntary action and its relationship to the state and welfare provision. The overarching aim is to explore the debates that have taken place on the role of voluntary action in the provision of welfare in the 1940s and 2010s in England. It will compare and contrast popular, political and VCS discourses. In order to meet this aim, we address 3 sets of questions: 1.What are the similarities and differences in narratives about the role, position and contribution of the VCS in the provision of social welfare in the 1940s compared with the 2010s? And, drawing on social origins theory, what combination of factors, including but not restricted to the balance of class forces, can help account for shifting narratives between the 1940s and 2010s? 2.What are the similarities and differences within and between the narratives of voluntary sector representatives, government officials, and the general public about the role, position and contribution of the voluntary and community sector in social welfare provision, firstly during the 1940s and secondly through the 2010s? And, drawing on the theory of strategic action fields, to what extent and how do different narratives reflect field shaping discursive interventions and a changing configuration of actors? 3.What evidence is there of how different narratives have been constructed, articulated, contested, and circulated? And, drawing on discursive institutionalism, how are different narratives related to each other in the struggle for 'room' and 'common sense' during periods of unsettlement and transition, as actors seek to frame action and construct the possibilities for change? Our approach to addressing these questions is to explore: 1.Public narratives: analysis of Mass Observation directives on voluntary action and social welfare from 1940s 2010s, plus one commissioned in 2017. 2.State narratives: analysis of key government policy documents (e.g. green and white papers, acts of parliament), speeches and parliamentary debates relating to the role of the voluntary sector in welfare service provision in England generated during the 1940s and 2010s (accessed from The National Archives, Historic Hansard, Hansard and various websites). 3. Voluntary sector narratives: focusing on 4 VCS organisations (NCVO, Children England, NCVYS, Age UK) review key statements, policy documents, and publications produced by them in the 1940s and 2010s, stored in their archives and websites. This 2 year study co-produced with NCVO, NCVYS, Children England, Age UK and Mass Observation; guided by a project Steering Group; and involving various knowledge exchange activities will contribute to the development of VCS policy and practice, through building capabilities, enhancing the existing evidence base and reframing debat

The U.K. population is projected to reach 80 million by 2050 and it is anticipated that the overwhelming majority will continue to live in cities. Besides becoming more densely populated, future cities will be surrounded with expanding urban areas. Interactions within cities; across urban areas and with surrounding cities, towns and 'rural' areas with the rest of the UK will place new and different demands on infrastructure, whether housing, energy, transport, freight distribution and disposal of waste. Decisions that are made now will have profound implications for the resultant pressures on transport, living space, energy use, and ecosystem services (the benefits humans receive from ecosystems). These decisions will play out at two fundamentally different spatial scales. First, and by far the better understood, are those decisions that concern individual households and their neighbourhoods. These include issues of how their members move around, what kinds of housing they occupy, how their energy demands and waste production are reduced, and how their negative influences on the wider environment generally will be limited. Second, broad scale strategic decisions regarding regional planning will determine where in the U.K. population growth is primarily accommodated. This will determine, and be shaped by, the kinds of transport and energy infrastructure required, and the environmental impacts. Obviously these two sets of decisions are not independent. The demands for and impacts of broad scale development (whether this be the creation of new urban areas or the intensification of existing ones) - and thus how this is best achieved to deliver sustainability- will be influenced not by the typical demands and impacts exhibited now by households, but by the way in which these have been changed in response to the modification to the associated infrastructure. This makes for a challenging problem in predicting and evaluating the possible consequences of different potential scenarios of regional development. The proposed study SElf Conserving URban Environments (SECURE) will address this grand challenge of integration across scales (the global aim) by developing a range of future regional urbanization scenarios, and exploring their consequences for selected high profile issues of resource demand and provision (transport, dwellings, energy, and ecosystem services) alongside sustainable waste utilisations. In doing so, it will build on findings of research outputs of several previous SUE projects and harness its relationship in the context of policy and economic growth. The study includes specific research objectives under five broad cross-cutting themes - Urbanisation, Ecosystems Services, Building and Energy, Stakeholder Engagement and Policy Integration across themes. SECURE is designed to assemble novel deliverables to bring about step change in current knowledge and practice. The North East Region will be used as a test bed and evaluation of transitional scenarios leading up to 2050 will quantify the benefits of integration across the scales through conservation across the themes. SECURE will deliver policy formulation and planning decisions for 2030 and 2050 with a focus on creating Sustainable Urban Environment.The contributors to this project are researchers of international standings who have collaborated extensively on several EPSRC funded projects, including the SUE research since its inception. The SECURE team builds on their current collaboration on the SUE2 4M project. The Project consortium is led by Newcastle - Prof Margaret Bell as PI and Dr Anil Namdeo as co-ordinator alongside Dr Jenny Brake with academic partners: Prof David Graham (Environmental Engineering), Prof David Manning (Geosciences); from Loughborough: Prof Kevin Lomas, Prof Jonathan Wright and Dr Steven Firth (Civil and Building Engineering); from Sheffield: Prof Kevin Gaston and Dr Jonathan Leake (Animal and Plant Sciences).

Across the UK political spectrum there is a consensus that communities need to play a greater role in local government, both in the decisions made that affect people's everyday lives, and in the design and delivery of services provided by local government to communities. With the enormous public uptake of digital technologies including broadband internet, mobile phones, laptop and tablet computers, there are opportunities to create more representative and sustainable forms of local democracy and service provision. Digital Civics is the endeavour of developing theories, technologies, design approaches and evaluation methods for digital technologies that support local communities, local service provision, and local democracy. However, this area poses new challenges for researchers across a range of disciplines. It requires researchers that are not only experts in local government and the services they provide (such as education, public health and social care), but also researchers that can: (i) understand the limitations of existing technologies and approaches to design and use; (ii) innovate in the design, delivery and evaluation of services; (iii) produce underpinning technologies that meet the real-world requirements of local service provision and local democracy. The primary goal of our Centre for Doctoral Training is therefore to train the next generation of researchers that can meet these challenges. The Centre has three distinctive features. Firstly, it brings together academics from 5 internationally leading centres of excellence already extensively engaged in Digital Civics research at Newcastle University: (i) experts in human-computer interaction and participatory media from Culture Lab; (ii) experts in security, privacy & trust from the Centre for Cyber Crime and Security; (iii) experts in public health and social care from the Institute of Health & Society; (iv) experts in education from the Centre for Learning and Teaching; and (iv) experts on planning and politics from the Global Urban Research Unit. Working together in a Centre for Digital Civics these academics will lead the training and supervision through a 1-year taught program in Digital Civics, and a carefully coordinated collection of 60 PhD 3-year research projects over the funded lifetime of the centre. Secondly, the research will be conducted in the context of real-world service provision and communities, through the engagement of three local councils (Newcastle, Gateshead & Northumberland) who will act a host partners to the research. The centre also has a significant number of deeply committed commercial, public sector and third sector partners who will actively engage in the design and delivery of the research training. These include many of the leading national and international organisations with a direct interest in building research capacity in Digital Civics. These include Philips Research, Microsoft Research, eBay Research Labs, Orange Labs, IBM Research, BBC R&D, Tunstall, BT Labs, Promethean and SMART Technologies. In addition to these partners, we also have a partnership of local and national social and commercial enterprises, and a network of international academics who will support academic exchanges placements which will provide an international profile to our students' portfolio. Only those collaborating partners who have demonstrated a real and substantial commitment to engage have been included in this proposal. The research training provided to students will be cross-disciplinary in nature and focused upon 3 challenging application domains for digital civics research. These are: local democracy, education, and public health & social care. There will also be 2 underpinning technology training programmes: human-computer interaction and security, privacy & trust. These 5 topics span the research expertise of our 5 international centres of excellence at Newcastle University.

The Digital Economy Research Centre (DERC) will theorise, design, develop, and evaluate new digitally mediated models of citizen participation that engage communities, the third sector, local government and (crucially) the commercial digital economy in developing the future of local service provision and local democracy. DERC will deliver a sustained program of multi- and cross- disciplinary research using research methods that are participatory, action-based, and embedded in the real world. The research approach will operate across multiple scales (e.g. individual, family, community, institution) and involve long-term embedded research activity at scale. The overarching challenges are significant: -- the development of new technologies and cloud-based platforms to provide access to open and citizen-generated data, big data analytics and software services at scale to support trusted communication, transactions, and co-production between coalitions of citizens, local government, the third and commercial sectors; -- the development of participatory methods to design digital services to support citizen prosumption at the scales of communities and beyond; -- the development of new cross-disciplinary insights into the role of digital technologies to support these service delivery contexts as well as understandings of the interdependency between contexts and their corresponding services. The backbone of this research agenda is a commitment to social inclusion and the utilisation of participatory processes for user engagement, consultation and representation in the design and adoption of new forms of digital services. The main research themes of DERC address the development of models of digitally enabled citizen participation in local democracy (planning), public health, social care and education, and the nature of new civic media to support these. The Centre's research will be conducted in the context of local government service provision in the Northeast of England, in close partnership with Newcastle City Council, Gateshead Council and Northumberland, and supported by a consortium of key commercial, third sector and professional body partners. DERC's extensive program of research, knowledge exchange and public engagement activities will involve over 20 postdoctoral researchers and 25 investigators from Computer Science (HCI, Social Computing, Cloud Computing, Security), Business & Economics, Behavioural Science, Planning, Education, Statistics, Social Gerontology, Public Health and Health Services Research.