The Salford of the future will be more resilient and better connected - and the future health, well-being and prosperity of its citizens will be at the heart of decision making. Its key systems for transport, housing, energy and other infrastructure will need to be sustainable, more intelligently integrated and adapted to the future impacts of climate change. A feasibility study is proposedto assess how systems and infrastructure investments in the City can be effectively integrated, made more efficient.. It will also explore how a ComMUSCo could enable citizens and local businesses to benefit from, and be more involved in, key investment decisions that will be critical to the future of the City and the health, well-being and prosperity of its citizens. Manchester City Council are also submitting TSB bid. Both have a distinct focus however, during the feasibility study stage both Cities we will explore potential areas of synergy to ensure that the benefits are maximised.

The Passions of Youth, which follows on from research conducted for an AHRC supported monograph, Being Boys, intends to showcase the creative potential of 'ordinary' working-class young men in their teens as an alternative to popular assumptions made about working-class young men, which tend to ignore the ordinary and everyday and focus on the exceptional, sensational and negative. This proposal focuses on the 'joiners', those who have actively followed particular leisure interests, with the aim of strengthening and validating their choices and communicating their enthusiasm for them to a public audience. The Passions of Youth celebrates the skills and experiences that working-class young men often develop when they participate in particular leisure activities, in this case football, speedway and music. The project is delivered through three groups in Manchester and Salford: FC United of Manchester, Belle Vue Aces (Speedway) and Salford Youth Hub, and uses a variety of creative approaches and the medium of these shared leisure passions to enable working-class young men in their teens and older working-class men who were teenagers between the 1940s and 1970s to explore changing experiences of youth. The young working-class men will be empowered to shape their own narratives of their leisure experiences and alternative interpretations of age and working-class masculinity. The Passions of Youth is more than about the activity itself, in this case, football, music and speedway racing; it offers participants opportunities to reflect on and become more self-aware of the wide range of skills these activities utilise, from social interaction and collaboration to self-sufficiency and resilience. A range of creative activities, chosen by the young men themselves, will help them to acquire new skills and the confidence to put their leisure pursuit into a broader historical and community context. The activities will build up knowledge and confidence by giving individuals a sense of empowerment and ownership to help them convey the personal meanings of their particular leisure enthusiasm and share, learn and reflect on it with others outside their immediate environment. The young men who participate will develop a range personal and transferable skills, becoming experienced in authoring the creative and social aspects of their projects, creating new archives and collections, articulating their own ideas and showing how history can be used to 'do something positive'. The involvement of Manchester Histories and the Manchester Histories Festivals in 2014 and 2015 will provide large audiences for the project's creative outcomes. Local communities will be encouraged to take pride in the expertise of these young men, public awareness of their potential will be raised and popular stereotypes of their behaviour will be challenged. The Passions of Youth is based on collaborative partnerships and sustainable, creative engagements between Manchester Metropolitan University, community organisations and those working in the creative professions across Greater Manchester, which will enable the young men to present and showcase their particular leisure enthusiasms to each other and to the public. The proposal's underlying aim is to communicate the potential of humanities research to stimulate fresh and innovative approaches to aspects of working-class young men's lives which are usually overlooked and unseen by the public and in broader political debates.

During and after the COVID-19 pandemic, there will be societal implications for all children. However, for those in the youth justice system the impacts are likely to be exceptional. A disproportionate number of these children have complex needs, are from BAME backgrounds, have experienced school exclusions, and many come from groups with generally worse outcomes than average, including those with exposure to adverse childhood experiences (Bateman, 2017). The youth justice system is facing a strange hiatus; on the one hand, criminal trials have been delayed and arrests are down, while on the other, existing issues of BAME disproportionality, mental health, domestic abuse and school engagement are areas of acute risk for justice-involved children. There is an urgent need to develop a clear understanding of the impact of the pandemic on these children and those who work with them. Indeed, there has been a lack of focus on this group both from a political and media perspective. We do know that the pandemic has had unprecedented implications and consequences for the youth justice system, from how professionals have had to adapt to remote working, the delay of criminal trials, and the safety of children in custodial settings. Liaising with our youth justice colleagues, we know that each stage of the youth justice system has responded differently. This project will bring together statutory partners, third sector organisations, senior national policy/decision-makers, and children with lived experiences. It will provide a unique opportunity to gather insight and to produce impactful recommendations. By involving and working with children in our project, we will address the usual top-down research hierarchies inherent in youth justice research and ensure that children's voices are prioritised.

The University of Hertfordshire and the National Centre for Atmospheric Science currently operate an Air Quality forecasting system. Like a weather forecast, the system uses a computer model to make predictions of the concentrations of air pollutants such as Ozone, Particulate Matter and Nitrogen Oxides. The forecast runs for the whole of the UK and predicts three days into the future and it produces maps of each pollutant at a spatial resolution of 10km. Alongside the Air Quality Forecasting capability the University of Hertfordshire has also developed models and expertise in modelling air quality in urban areas. Air Quality can be highly influenced by the regional and national scale effects predicted by the Air Quality forecast but it is also influenced by very local effects such as emissions from traffic on a particular road, the local weather and even the local buildings and landscape. For this reason we have a separate system for urban areas which operates at a very high resolution. The urban system uses data that describes the pollution from individual roads for example. This urban model also has data to describe where people live and work so we can calculate pollutant concentrations in different parts of a city and at different times of day, then use that information to estimate the 'exposure' to pollution faced by the local population where they live and work. Because 'exposure' combines both pollutant levels and the time people spend in polluted areas, it is allows us to understand the likely health impact air pollution is having on the population. In this project we will forecast air quality and exposure for two urban areas, Greater Manchester and Bristol. The unique innovations in the project are to bring air quality and exposure forecasts down to the street and city scales, whilst making all the data available to the local authorities for the first time. To do this we will continue to operate the UK Air Quality Forecast and feed its predictions into the urban scale model. This will allow us to create pollution maps, a three day forecast and exposure estimates at a local scale for Bristol and Greater Manchester. The data will allow the local authorities to study air quality trends and statistics and find low pollution routes for cyclists and pedestrians. They will be able to use the data to make better planning decisions, improve education schemes and optimise pollution reduction measures to have the greatest impact. The delivery of exposure data alongside pollution concentrations is especially important for maximising the effectiveness of strategies to improve health. We will make all of the model data available to the local authorities by creating an online data dashboard. This will allow the local authorities access to all the model data via an easy to use graphical user interface. By creating the data dashboard we will remove a barrier currently preventing wider exploitation of air quality model data and unlock the potential benefits of modeled air quality data to local authorities and the general public. This project will directly address the needs of Local Authorities to meet their statutory responsibility to monitor and manage Air Quality. The responsibility for meeting EU air quality limit values is devolved to them. Our Local Authority partners, Bristol and Greater Manchester, attribute the premature death of approximately 200 and 1300 people annually to Air Quality respectively. This project will help the Bristol and Greater Manchester authorities by underpinning and informing their strategies for improving health and reducing air pollution with new, unique datasets. This data will allow the Local Authorities to optimally implement new and exiting initiatives such as promoting cycling, walking and public transport, managing goods vehicle, traffic management, low emission zones, planning guidance and education and informing the public of Air Quality health risks.

This project will address one of the most important issues facing society: the increase in underemployed, vulnerable workers resulting from industrial changes, the 2008 recession, and the Covid-19 pandemic. How we work is changing, with potential to deliver greater efficiency and wellbeing, but also greater precarity and inequality (Beck et al, 2020; Schwab, 2016). Short- and longer-term effects of labour market ruptures have seen underemployment spiral upwards (ILO, 2020) as employers seek to protect profits and/or business. At the same time, staff and skills shortages in the wake of Brexit; the precarious nature of work in some sectors; and the effects of furloughing provide further risk and insecurity for workers but also potential for changes in employment and working conditions. The coexistence of underemployment and staff shortages makes this investigation relevant to policy makers and practitioners. We aim to understand impacts of labour market changes on underemployment, the ways that social inequalities affect vulnerability to underemployment and the effect of the latter on inequalities, and, utilising robust results in discussions with policy makers and practitioners, identify how this can be mitigated. In the process, the reoccurring policy mantra that employment is the best way out of poverty and that any job is better than no job is challenged. Developing good quality employment in hours, skill use, and wages (HSW) is crucial because 1 in 7 food bank users are (mainly part time) employed, with problems deepening during the pandemic (Trussell Trust, 2019, 2021). Headline government figures extol record numbers in employment but disguise the complexity of the contemporary labour market. Before the pandemic, nearly a million (2.7%) UK workers were in involuntary part-time jobs, with 5.2% preferring more hours (Bell and Blanchflower, 2013, 2019). At the height of the pandemic, almost a third of men working part-time in the UK said that they were doing so because they could not find a full-time job (Torres et al. 2021). Between 30 and 51% of employees were overqualified and 37% overskilled for their current job (CIPD, 2018). In-work poverty affected 13% of the workforce, with 18% of low-paid workers wanting more hours (JRF, 2019). Low paid workers were hit hardest by the fallout of the pandemic, facing increasing risks of precarious work, rising living costs and financial hardship (Warren et al, 2021). Employment no longer equals full-time, sufficient, secure or good work. The spread and potential upsurge of underemployment raises concerns about limited theoretical and empirical understandings of this concept. Supply-side economic and psychological perspectives (Dooley, 2003; Mousteri et al, 2020) dominate debates and emphasise individual choices and preferences. Our proposed research innovatively shifts understanding towards a sociological perspective focused on lived experiences of underemployment. This shift is important because access to decent, paid employment is not evenly distributed. For example, women (Kamerade and Richardson, 2018; Bond et al, 2009; McQuaid et al., 2010), younger/older workers (Beck, 2015; Beck and Williams, 2015), and the working-class (Warren, 2015) are more vulnerable to underemployment. Exploring the range of lived experiences allows an investigation into the causes and consequences of underemployment. Feldman (1996) and Dooley (2003) warned of risks for underemployed workers' job security, incomes, well-being and social standing. Key knowledge gaps addressed in this project include ways in which social inequalities alter outcomes of underemployment for workers and their families; trends in each indicator of underemployment (hours, wages, skills), their combined effects, and how underemployment affects industrial relations systems, employers and businesses, business models, unions, communities, policymakers and their practices, especially given Covid-19, Brexit and recessions.