Our Phase 1 project, Accelerating York's Net Zero Transition identified significant non-technical barriers to consumer acceptance and uptake of retrofit and low carbon technologies. This proposal directly builds on those findings, by combining innovative approaches to place-based engagement, digital tools and data systems, tailored training and advice bespoke financing solutions, demonstrator homes and dissemination into a single end-to-end Retrofit-One-Stop-Shop for York. The project brings together partners specialising in each element of delivery into a collaboration that will greatly accelerate the development of an area based Retrofit-One-Stop-Shop, improving the householder experience of retrofit and contributing to better energy efficiency standards of all building archetypes across the city. Homes will be warmer and cheaper to heat with complimentary technologies to maximise energy efficiency and mobility options. The project directly benefits our community with financial savings and health and wellbeing benefits. It also supports growth in the local low carbon supply chain, generating opportunities for new investment and job creation. The One-Stop-Shop service will be available to all residents and tenure types, but specifically support vulnerable and disadvantaged groups by addressing issues with fuel poverty and homes that are unsafe due to cold, drafts and damp. The scheme will be supporting the ambitions of the York Climate Change Strategy, Health and Wellbeing Strategy and Economic Development Strategy, as well as contributing to regional and national targets for net zero. It will provide a replicable and scalable model for expansion into other areas of UK, offering the One-Stop-Shop-In-a-Box Toolkit, drastically reducing the time and cost associated with other area-based One-Stop-Shops.

Climate change is the greatest threat facing our planet. In York, we are committed to tackling this threat; in 2019, City of York Council declared a climate emergency and set an ambition for York to be net zero carbon by 2030\. Previous research has shown that buildings are the largest source of emissions in York, accounting for over 60% of our locally derived emissions. There are more than 80,000 homes in York, with additional commercial and public buildings. To achieve net zero, over half of these homes will need to be retrofitted (44,000) with insulation, glazing and draughtproofing improvements, as well as installing 73,000 heat pumps. Transport is another significant contributor to emissions in York (27%), with a projected requirement for 91,000 fully electric vehicles to decarbonise the transport system. York has one of the most extensive public EV charging networks outside of London, following a programme of off-street infrastructure provision. In the last 5 years, we have seen a 10-fold increase in the number of charging sessions on the public network, with reports that users are finding it increasingly difficult to access available charge-points. The increased electrification of heating and transport systems across the city will increase York's annual demand for electricity from 773 GWh to 1,273 GWh. Modelling has indicated the potential for rooftop solar PV to contribute 91 GWh per year at an estimated capital cost of £137million. By combining social, capacity, financial and structural approaches, this project creates a holistic and practical application of the outcomes from Local Area Energy Planning - providing a framework for local areas to achieve decarbonisation through local acceleration zones.

Summary In a time of austerity and low economic growth the challenges faced by low-waged workers in earning enough to support themselves and their families to achieve a socially acceptable standard of living are immense. Identifying effective and sustainable pathways out of in-work poverty for these workers holds significant benefit for the workers, their families and the state. However for employers facing increasing expectations to view their employees' wage through a lens of social responsibility rather than purely productivity or market comparison, this can amount to another significant cost pressure, to be set against a general background of competing wage demands throughout the organisation's workforce. Understanding how effective different anti-poverty measures actually are for workers, and how sustainable they are as long-term measures to be engaged with by employers, is therefore crucial to the in-work poverty policy debate. A debate that is increasingly urgent as recent UK figures show in-work poverty to be currently outstripping that of poverty in workless households. This project provides a unique and valuable opportunity for a team of social scientists from the University of York and three important employers from the York labour market to work together on an applied research project that will help employers identify the likely effectiveness and sustainability of current measures being employed to reduce in-work poverty within their organisations. The project partners are the City of York Council (CYC), Joseph Rowntree Foundation/Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust (JRF/JRHT) and York St John University (YSJU). The research project and knowledge exchange will focus on one specific geographical labour market, York. However the challenges currently being faced by these three employers are not York specific. Therefore the investigation and development of effective and sustainable strategies to deal with in-work poverty within these three project partner organisations will have much relevance to many more employers (and workers) across the UK. To investigate which are the most effective and sustainable policies to reduce in-work poverty the project will undertake: 1. an employer and worker level analysis of the effects of the adoption of a living wage policy within the organisation and issues relating to the sustainability of the living wage commitment. Research which will not only be supporting CYC, JRF/JRHT and YSJU in their own organisation's adoption and sustainable embedding of the living wage policy but it will also provide an important evaluation of a wage policy considered to be a cornerstone of any anti-poverty employer stance, an evaluation which will have potential value to many more organisations in the UK. 2. an assessment of the constraints and challenges currently being faced by workers from the three project partner workforces will be undertaken through the design and collection of two surveys; the first will be a survey of a sample of workers (about 500 workers) earning below a particular wage rate at the three partner organisations. The second will be a survey that follows-up a sample of workers (about 40 workers) who responded to the first survey and were found to be experiencing or at risk of in-work poverty. Both surveys will allow an assessment of how effective current anti-poverty policies engaged with by the employers actually are for the workers. 3. an analysis using national and regional data on wage distributions, wage growth, and in-work poverty over time to provide a framing or background to the discussion of which are the most effective and sustainable pathways out of in-work poverty. This analysis will help to generalise the project findings beyond the York labour market and set the experiences of the project partners' York based employees into a national context.

This research will explore the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on child protection practice and service users and improve the capacity of social workers and other professionals to keep children safe in a period of institutionalised social distancing. Building on our existing research on the use of digital technology in everyday life (Pink et al, 2015; Pink et al, 2017) and effective child protection, especially the centrality of social workers getting close to children in their homes (Ferguson, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2020), we will identify areas of concern and advise on effective responses. Using digital ethnographic methods at four anonymised sites, the study will generate and rapidly disseminate in-depth knowledge of new challenges and social work practices developed in response to COVID-19, such as the novel use of digital technologies, and their impact on service users, social workers and social work organisations. Qualitative - interview, visual and digital - methods will be used to gather data from social work staff and service users about in-person and 'virtual home visits'. These insights will be used to rapidly inform child protection practice nationally. Engagement with participants and our collaborators the British Association of Social Workers and Research in Practice will shape recommendations for practice and coproduced guidance, and ensure national dissemination and impact. This will enhance the capacity of social workers nationally to keep children safe at a time of new and potentially increased risk, including of dometic abuse, and will also have future research use, such as informing the embedding of digital technologies into social work practice.

Addressing theme 1 and to a lesser extent theme 2. A climate emergency has been declared by 74% of UK local authorities. As they respond to this via increased tree planting targets for carbon sequestration, it is imperative that they also realise the multiple public benefits - health and wellbeing, green infrastructure, social amenity, the green economy - that treescapes can provide. Local authorities need a vision of future societal needs and the forms of future treescapes that might meet them; we will deliver the evidence and decision making processes to realise such a vision. Most studies on the biophysical and amenity aspects of urban treescapes neglect wider social and cultural values that cannot easily be quantified. Consequently, the symbolic, heritage, spiritual and social and cultural (S&C) values of treescapes are not meaningfully accounted for. This problem is becoming increasingly acute, as protests arise around individual trees (Sheffield street trees) or woods (proposed sale of the public forest estate), exacerbated by pressure from business and housing development. 'Branching Out' will evaluate the S&C values of urban trees across three cities, and develop new ways of mapping, predicting and communicating those values to support robust, evidence-based decision making and management. The three selected focus cities purposefully have different planning histories, supporting subsequent widespread adoption of our novel approach. York (historical) and Cardiff (post-industrial) are county towns, while Milton Keynes is a post-1960s new town. Each city has particular, yet not uncommon, challenges relating to their treescapes, has declared a climate emergency, and expects trees to play a role in mitigation and adaptation. Our central tenet comprises three broad approaches: 1) co-production, using deliberative methods with citizens and stakeholders, to develop a holistic value framework; 2) storytelling, creating narrative accounts of meaning and value of the past, present and future; 3) mapping, to link biophysical features and S&C values. Our approach will map both values that are generalisable and those that are particular and highly situated. Our mapping approaches encompass the past, present and future, using historical sources to map the impact of past values on current treescape form and function. We will use our established tree citizen science platform, Treezilla, to collect biophysical data from new Urban Tree Observatories. Remote sensing will characterise tree condition and canopy properties, and scale the biophysical data across the focal cities. This project will address local authorities' need for high-resolution mapping of tree characteristics, resulting in Europe's largest, most robust urban tree dataset, accompanied by descriptors of S&C value that can be used to recreate such datasets across other urban areas using freely available satellite data. The tools we co-create will provide local authorities with useable evidence for decision making to predict the impacts of developments or changes on S&C value, and enable them to calculate more accurately the impacts of changes on ecosystem services. Such multidimensional mapping can reveal inequalities in current and future provision of benefits as treescapes change through time, providing a better understanding of how and where those inequalities can be addressed. A series of design workshops will experiment with ways of mapping S&C values in relation to the remote-sensed biophysical characteristics of our urban treescapes, producing techniques and tools for sensing and mapping values. Using these tools as provocations, we will speculate on possible futures for our urban treescapes, built around an appreciation and understanding of S&C values. Through these methods this project will embed S&C values in planning and decision-making for urban trees at local and national scales, thereby meeting society's and planning needs now and in the future.