This study asks how leading countries are organising and using national and regional diagnostic testing systems for Covid19 ('testing systems') in order to reduce Covid-19 mortality per capita in their populations, to avoid or shorten 'lock-downs', and reduce economic impacts from the pandemic. We will explain how testing systems have been shaped during the pandemic, and how challenges related to testing are overcome. The research will span North America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia as well as the UK. The project builds on an established Covid-19 UK research and knowledge exchange hub at the University of Sussex that has been facilitating rapid dialogue and dissemination of research on Covid-19 diagnostic testing between the international research team and policy makers in the UK and beyond. The hub has a track-record of reporting results that have been widely welcomed and valued by the UK civil service and reported widely to public audiences in the media. As the pandemic continues, understanding the use of testing systems remains vital to optimise the Covid-19 response and save lives. With innovation and learning continuing (e.g. around the UK government's ambitious mass-testing programme), we propose to undertake further comparative research to share lessons across contexts. In order to support Covid-19 responses internationally, we will engage with governments and share deliverables from the early months of this 15-month project. Additionally, to inform preparations for future outbreaks and pandemics, we will contribute to national and international fora seeking to learn lessons from the current crisis.

In the late 1960s, it became apparent to Britain's most senior defence planners that the ability of the United Kingdom's Polaris submarine-launched ballistic missiles to reach their targets in the Soviet Union was threatened by the deployment of a new Soviet anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system around Moscow. After prolonged debate, it was decided in 1970 by the new Conservative Government to begin a feasibility and project definition study for a highly-secret Polaris improvement programme which was designed to give the missiles the capability to penetrate Soviet ABM defences. Having rejected other alternative options, in late 1973 full development of the improved system was approved by ministers. Despite intense budgetary pressures, growing technical problems with the project (leading to major escalation), and anti-nuclear sentiment within the Labour Party, the Labour Government that assumed office in 1974 continued with the project, restricting knowledge of what was now called the Chevaline programme to only a small group of ministers and top officials. When its existence was revealed to the House of Commons in January 1980, immediate attention was drawn to the high costs of the programme (then amounting to about £1 billion), the technical problems it had apparently encountered, and the consequent slips in timescale. In 1982, just a few months before Chevaline was finally deployed, the Public Accounts Committee issued a report which heavily criticised the Ministry of Defence's management of the whole programme, and the way it had been hidden from any form of parliamentary scrutiny since instigation of feasibility and project definition. The Chevaline programme has since become renowned as one of the most controversial aspects of post-war British defence policy. The proposed research will examine the history of the Polaris improvement programme in the context of the development of the British strategic nuclear deterrent from the decision to acquire the Polaris system at the Nassau Conference in December 1962, to the final deployment of Chevaline two decades later. The focus of the research will be on the policymaking of successive British governments as they sought to maintain the credibility of the deterrent, and the problems that were faced by the improvement programme during the 1970s, as timescales slipped and costs escalated. The research will result in the production of a volume in the Cabinet Office's official history series, and will constitute a comprehensive and standard work of reference on the subject, of interest to academics, policymakers, and a more general audience interested in modern British history, defence policy, and the topical issues surrounding Britain's continued possession of a strategic nuclear deterrent.

Since 9-11 and 7-7, terrorism has been a major public concern. To ensure public safety and to protect the UK economy, research is needed that offers new methods to foil attacks before they are executed, to identify people and networks who might be preparing for or undertaking an attack, and to provide clear evidence that can be used to justify questioning, arrests and prosecutions. In this study, we will investigate whether deception can be identified and proved from 'scent trails', that is, coherent accounts of suspects' activities over time compiled from tracking their movements, communications and behaviours. We will develop software to derive inferences about what activities are consistent with suspects' scent trails and what are ruled out. These inferences will allow investigators to challenge suspects, both in real time (e.g., to encourage suspects to abandon an ongoing attack) and during interviews (e.g., to point out inconsistencies between a suspect's account and scent trail evidence that might change the course of an interview). The project will investigate scent trails in the context of people undertaking deceptive activities to gain advantage in adversarial 'treasure hunt'-type games. The games will be developed in consultation with stakeholders to provide a non-sensitive analogy to counter-terrorism contexts. Players, typically undergraduate students paid for participation, will be monitored during games via positional and communication data obtained from mobile devices enabled with geospatial positioning devices. Novel software for integrating these data will be developed to build up scent trails of players' activities during game play. Methods of artificial intelligence will be combined to derive inferences from the scent trails about what kinds of activity are possible and impossible given a player's location, trajectory, activities and links with others. We envision games with 3 teams: Team A represent the adversary, Team B the police or general public, and Team C the intelligence services. Team A scores points by visiting target locations within a time limit under a set of game rules that they must violate if they are to win. They must try to hide rule violations from Team B, who score points by preventing or identifying Team A's deceptions successfully. Team C can challenge Team A by sending them indications of the scent trails that are held or can feed Team B intelligence information. Moreover, the inferences from scent trails will support Team C in deciding how best to prove or falsify a suspicion during an interview with Team A players at key points during the games. By conducting observation of players during games, we can investigate how people change their behaviours when they are confronted with evidence that reveals their deceptions. We will also interview players at key points during games as a simulation of interviews with suspects, eliciting from players accounts of their activities before presenting them with challenges based on their own scent trails that are either consistent or inconsistent with legal game playing. This will allow interview and analysis techniques to be improved and will provide clues as to how people subsequently change their behaviour after they have been confronted with their deception. The results will also allow us to test between hypotheses deriving from forensic psychology as to how best to detect deception. The research also allows us to explore public awareness of, and response to, monitoring and surveillance in counter-terrorism. With an advisory panel of stakeholders and subject specialists representing key public and academic bodies, we will identify ethical and legal issues associated with collecting and using data on peoples' movements through public spaces. We will also conduct questionnaire studies with game players and others not involved in the games, to measure attitudes to monitoring and surveillance in game-playing and other contexts.

The Local Growth White Paper, published by the UK government in October 2010, announced a major change in the institutional framework for delivering business support in England. The nine regional development agencies were to close and, instead, business support would be organized through Local Economic Partnerships (LEPs). The LEPs need for data also brings into sharper focus some data-related constraints which have restricted progress in our own programme of research linking firm-level performance with labour market adjustment processes. In two different areas - measuring the incidence and impact of high growth firms and in the construction of job creation and destruction accounts - the missing link between the ONS firm-level and establishment-level data has made it impossible to answer properly questions about the dynamics of employment change which are of importance both to policymakers and researchers. Currently, the BSD consists of two independent - firm and establishment - sets of annual snapshots of the Inter-Departmental Business Register (IDBR). Each firm-level snapshot has nearly 2 million records and each establishment-level snapshot has around 5 million records. The significance of the distinction between these two is that the firm-level records locate all of the firm's jobs at the address of the firm's headquarters. But, of course, in a multi-establishment firm many of the jobs will be elsewhere located at an establishment's address. So if we wish to construct sub-national level job accounts we need a mixture of firm and establishment-level information. To do this we need to construct longitudinally-linked datasets for firms and establishments in order to enable us to identify where jobs are located. This is a considerable computational task. We have already constructed the longitudinal firm-level dataset covering the years 1997-2010. The initial task in this project is to construct the longitudinal dataset for establishments. Because of the number of records involved this can only be done incrementally (we have investigated doing this at the regional level and this does seem feasible). Once this is done we can then link the two together. However, there are a number of additional and significant complications. First, when we come to connect these two firm- and establishment-level datasets: establishments can and do move from firm to firm. Second, establishments in one region may be part of a firm which is located in another region. Finally, birth and death dates of establishments may need some adjustment to ensure that they do match those of their associated firms. Having completed this infrastructure investment phase we will have a unique resource which has never previously been available. The code used to construct this new dataset will be made available as one output of this project (of course the raw data will still only be accessible to ONS Approved Researchers). Extending our own work at the national level the main outputs of the project will be job creation and destruction accounts and an assessment of the incidence and impact of high-growth firms for each of the 39 English LEPs as well as three devolved Administrations. These two sets of analyses are of substantive interest to academics but even more to policymakers concerned with driving economic growth at the local level. The analyses will also serve as a demonstration of the value added by the creation of this new dataset.

Since 9-11 and 7-7, terrorism has been a major public concern. To ensure public safety and to protect the UK economy, research is needed that offers new methods to foil attacks before they are executed, to identify people and networks who might be preparing for or undertaking an attack, and to provide clear evidence that can be used to justify questioning, arrests and prosecutions.In this study, we will investigate whether deception can be identified and proved from 'scent trails', that is, coherent accounts of suspects' activities over time compiled from tracking their movements, communications and behaviours. We will develop software to derive inferences about what activities are consistent with suspects' scent trails and what are ruled out. These inferences will allow investigators to challenge suspects, both in real time (e.g., to encourage suspects to abandon an ongoing attack) and during interviews (e.g., to point out inconsistencies between a suspect's account and scent trail evidence that might change the course of an interview).The project will investigate scent trails in the context of people undertaking deceptive activities to gain advantage in adversarial 'treasure hunt'-type games. The games will be developed in consultation with stakeholders to provide a non-sensitive analogy to counter-terrorism contexts. Players, typically undergraduate students paid for participation, will be monitored during games via positional and communication data obtained from mobile devices enabled with geospatial positioning devices. Novel software for integrating these data will be developed to build up scent trails of players' activities during game play. Methods of artificial intelligence will be combined to derive inferences from the scent trails about what kinds of activity are possible and impossible given a player's location, trajectory, activities and links with others.We envision games with 3 teams: Team A represent the adversary, Team B the police or general public, and Team C the intelligence services. Team A scores points by visiting target locations within a time limit under a set of game rules that they must violate if they are to win. They must try to hide rule violations from Team B, who score points by preventing or identifying Team A's deceptions successfully. Team C can challenge Team A by sending them indications of the scent trails that are held or can feed Team B intelligence information. Moreover, the inferences from scent trails will support Team C in deciding how best to prove or falsify a suspicion during an interview with Team A players at key points during the games.By conducting observation of players during games, we can investigate how people change their behaviours when they are confronted with evidence that reveals their deceptions. We will also interview players at key points during games as a simulation of interviews with suspects, eliciting from players accounts of their activities before presenting them with challenges based on their own scent trails that are either consistent or inconsistent with legal game playing. This will allow interview and analysis techniques to be improved and will provide clues as to how people subsequently change their behaviour after they have been confronted with their deception. The results will also allow us to test between hypotheses deriving from forensic psychology as to how best to detect deception.The research also allows us to explore public awareness of, and response to, monitoring and surveillance in counter-terrorism. With an advisory panel of stakeholders and subject specialists representing key public and academic bodies, we will identify ethical and legal issues associated with collecting and using data on peoples' movements through public spaces. We will also conduct questionnaire studies with game players and others not involved in the games, to measure attitudes to monitoring and surveillance in game-playing and other contexts.