Neil Barnett is Y-PERN Policy Fellow for Yorkshire & Humber Councils, helping local policy-makers negotiate an increasingly complex set of governing arrangements around the devolution agenda.
As the Y-PERN Policy Fellow for the Yorkshire & Humber Councils, Neil is responsible for…
Research into governance arrangements in the region and issues around the devolution agenda. Neil is liaising between the local governments, Combined Authorities and other public agencies in the region and the Y-PERN network to identify on-going research needs, particularly as new governance structures come into being and develop.
Neil’s most looking forward to…
Helping local policy-makers as they negotiate an increasingly complex set of governing arrangements and an ever more acute set of demands for public service delivery. This will be a process of mutual learning in an evolving landscape, so he’s also looking forward to seeing how the relationship develops between academics and policy makers, and how Y-PERN can help to establish a model for ‘feeding in’ research to the policy cycle.
Key areas of focus for Neil are…
The devolution agenda, with the established and newly created Combined Authorities developing patterns of working and collaboration with the local governments and other stakeholders in a environment of multi-level governance. Initially, this has involved him collating international evidence re devolution and decentralisation, and a key area of focus will be on how these trends play out in our particular places – the region, sub-regions, cities, towns and neighbourhoods. In addition, councils continue to grapple with the consequences of austerity and budget-tightening, necessitating that this be conducted against the background of ensuring that organisational arrangements are focussed on effective delivery of public services.
Neil joins us with a background in…
Politics and public management. Neil was a local government officer before moving to (the then named) Leeds Metropolitan University as a Senior Lecturer in Public Policy. He has developed and led management development programmes, delivered in-house to councils in the region, including Leeds, Kirklees, Rotherham and North East Lincolnshire, and taught and delivered on a range of undergraduate and post graduate programmes. He’s authored and co-authored articles in a range of Journals, including Local Government Studies, Political Studies, and Environment and Planning (C) and a series of research reports for the Association of Public Service Excellence (APSE).
The University of Hull’s commitment to working with, and to the benefit of, local and coastal communities continues with new projects bringing creative community engagement to people in Skipsea and Cowden.
This forms part of our wider objectives to work more closely and collaboratively with other organisations, partners and communities who already live and work in coastal areas. This includes highlighting and sharing the important and often overlooked life stories and experiences of those living along the East Riding coastline.
Working with partners from the newly funded East Riding Coastal Transition Accelerator Project (CTAP), academic researchers and PhD students from the Energy and Environment Institute organised two informal drop-in workshops in November 2023. Local residents were invited to share their experiences of coastal change, putting their stories onto large-scale printed maps, and sharing photographs and memories of the changing local coastline.
In doing so we built on the ‘learning histories’ approach we previously utilised in our Risky Cities project. By drawing on individual experiences and collective histories we are able to generate discussions that drive climate awareness, action and resilience.
Workshop participants overlay their stories and local maps
Building on the legacies of previous projects in Withernsea and Skipsea, we wanted to better understand what people’s stories could tell us about how communities can be supported by academic researchers working on coastal change. By putting community needs at the start of the research design process we hope to better serve our local communities as part of our University-wide commitment to being a positive civic organisation in the region.
We wanted to hear and amplify the voices of those who are seldomly heard, who are most exposed to the effects of coastal erosion and who have tried to overcome the challenges by building on the knowledge that has been shared over generations. As academic researchers this also makes our work more likely to have real-world impacts, which is something that we are deeply committed to at the Energy and Environment Institute and in our partnership with the Yorkshire & Humber Policy Engagement Research Network (Y-PERN). From our previous work on the Risky Cities project, we know that building strong, lasting relationships with communities is really important for delivering research that makes a difference. It is also important for the Coastal Transition Accelerator Project that local voices inform their work to increase community resilience.
Workshop participant looks through local photographs
Participants shared testimonies, images and family albums they have kept over the years. They told us their stories and what matters, worries them, and what they have learned from their experience of living along the coast. From years of neighbours watching parts of the coastline change and houses, shops and farms come and go; to memories of walking dogs along the beach and increasingly difficult access to the shoreline as entryways are washed away; to a cow falling over the cliff edge and walking up the beach to be rescued further north.
These stories highlight the social, historical and physical impacts of erosion and how experiences of change, loss and hope are encountered at an everyday level. They express a need to remember and support the voices of those most affected, with many participants expressing their frustration those who had lost the most were often those also having to pay for demolition of unsafe properties.
We plan that these creative workshops will form part of our continued engagement with partners and communities on the east coast – as we scale up our community engagement work across East Riding and continue to develop community led knowledge of the coast.
Dr Dan Olner is Y-PERN Policy Fellow for South Yorkshire, helping to foster relationships between the combined mayoral authority and academics, with particular research interests in spatial economics.
Originally published on 13 August 2023 at DanOlner.net
Y-PERN (“Yorkshire & Humber Policy Engagement and Research Network”) is a pretty unique project – Research England funded it specifically to strengthen the glue between Yorkshire and Humber’s universities and its local and mayoral authorities, building on a memorandum of understanding between them. The project itself doesn’t have traditional academic research questions or output requirements; the glue-strengthening is the whole point.
I’m one of eight (soon to be 11) policy fellows, and we’re kind of the glue, embedded in various local government bodies in Yorkshire and Humber. I’m regularly in SYMCA’s Sheffield office, working with them on specific projects. That experience has been fantastic – the level of daily collaboration is high. As one of the other fellows said, “The policy environment changes massively faster than academia,” making for a very different structure and pace. And SYMCA is full of incredibly smart and dedicated people – I’m feeling blessed to have a chance to work with them.
I’ve actually been in Y-PERN / SYMCA for several months, but only part time as I prototyped my way to a new work outcome, mixed with a few other freelance data science bits and bobs. But now that I’m fully Y-PERN, and getting stuck into some intense spatial economics goodness, it’ll be great to write/think about it all.
English Devolution (which will soon cover more than half of the English economy) is kindling a resurgence in fundamental economic and social questions, grounded in the places we live, asking how we can change those places for the better. To quote SYMCA’s Strategic Economic Plan (PDF):
We want to build a better economy, higher value and higher tech, more directly linked to the wellbeing of our population and planet, where people are more engaged and empowered to share in the fruits of their labour.
SYMCA Strategic Economic Plan
There’s some amazing work being done on how data can be used to support this, and gnarly issues around how evidence gets built into the machinery of governance. Work on inclusive economies has shown (LGA report) there’s no clear connection between raw GVA growth and disposable income growth. Others in, for example, the SIPHER project and Manchester’s inclusive growth analysis unit are asking exactly what role data and evidence can play in attacking spatial inequality(see this great spreadsheet put together by SIPHER that gathers several organisation’s inclusive economy measures into one place). This includes work with communities to create indicators that make sense to them, rather than simply imposing ones institutions prefer to work with (though there is of course still a need to use existing, robust national data sources).
Continuing the inclusive economies theme, there’s a recognition of the deep connection between all the economic and spatial determinants of health written into South Yorkshire’s Integrated Care Partnership health strategy, including the role of housing, employment and access to transport. That’s supported by a mature national data system – fingertips – that is not as well known as it should be, maybe due to its health focus. Because it covers “wider determinants”, it actually contains a huge swathe of the all the best social and economic data, with excellent APIs and R/Python packages, and is the foundation for this epic piece of analysis (word doc download) that supports South Yorkshire’s health strategy.
The image below is a summary of work done to understand what underpins the alleged “Glasgow effect”, from a presentation (second from the bottom on that page) by Dr. David Walsh of the Glasgow Centre for Population Health. I find it a really effective reminder not only the complexity of the economics/health connection, but also the vital importance of understanding a place’s history. Different kinds of data can act as individual lenses, with their own distortions and blind spots – but data alone isn’t insight. We have to piece that together from as many knowledge sources as we can, including learning how past events led us to where we are.
The same is true for understanding how spatial economics underpins thriving (or struggling) places. As I tried to get across in our energy policy paper, there’s still a lot we don’t fully understand about how the wiring of spatial economies work – again, with data and theory giving only partial glimpses of the reality – and yet the issues we face are as intense as they’ve ever been, with a cost of living crisis and pandemic recovery piled on top of trying to figure out how to rewire spatial economies for zero carbon. Definitive answers are unlikely to be imminent; that paper stole an old Zapatista saying: we have to ‘walk asking‘.
So we need things to ask while we walk, and one of my favourite ways to find fresh questions has always been… old books. They’re full of the best questions – it’s just that they tend to drop out of fashion rather than ever be resolved. Everything circles round. I was reminded of this after my first visit to the incredible, labyrinthine Scarthin Books in Cromford recently. The shop left me no choice but to buy a bunch of old economics books… In Peter Donaldson’s populariser, ‘a Guide to the British Economy’ (1971), he notes that faith in nineteenth century laissez-faire economics was shattered in the 1930s depression, before saying:
Economics today is more interesting than ever before, because we now realise that the economy is neither an automatic mechanism which can safely be left to chug smoothly along its own optimal path, nor governed by blind and unpredictable forces over which we can have no control. Its proper behaviour can only be secured by deliberate manipulation, and developments in economic theory have indicated some of the basic techniques necessary for this purpose.
‘A Guide to the British Economy’, Peter Donaldson
Of course, things took a rather different course later in the 70s… but we find ourselves asking the same questions again. What level of control do we have? What levers do we have? Can we make new levers regionally, locally? How? What role can and do data and evidence play in all this? Questions of some practical importance as well as theoretical intrigue, but in the meantime, there’s some actual nuts and bolts spatial economic data analysis to be done – hopefully I can write about that in more detail soon.
And more ramblings to come about the questions. This post looks at some of those ideas that Donaldson thought had died, resurfacing in the 70s and still swirling about in odd places, if of interest – note how it connects to evidence-based decision making (all the stuff about ‘planners promising utopias’).
Oh and p.s. – check out Alfred Marshall’s excellent list of questions for economics from 1895; how many of those have been resolved versus just gone out of fashion?
Dr Andy Mycock is Y-PERN Chief Policy Fellow, providing overall strategic leadership of the programme and coordination of the team of Y-PERN policy fellows across the region.
As Chief Policy Fellow, Andy is part of the Y-PERN directorate providing overall strategic leadership of the programme, working closely with the Senior Programme Manager, Kayleigh Renberg-Fawcett. Andy leads on the coordination of the team of Y-PERN policy fellows across the region, and the delivery and evaluation of the four programme Work Packages. He has responsibility for delivering Work Package 3 which focuses on policy engagement training, dissemination, and community engagement. Andy is the key contact point for engagement and networking with academic and policy communities across Yorkshire and the UK more widely, and dissemination of Y-PERN outputs.
Andy Mycock
Chief Policy Fellow of the Yorkshire and Humber Policy Engagement and Research Network
A political scientist with extensive experience of research-led academic policy engagement, Andy collaborates with a wide range of government and non-government stakeholders across the UK and internationally. Andy sits on the executive committee of the University Policy Engagement Network and is an elected trustee of the Political Studies Association. He was invited to sit on the UK Government Youth Citizenship Commission (2008-9) and chaired the Kirklees Democracy Commission (2016-2018) and have frequently advised UK and devolved governments on youth citizenship policies. Andy is an academic member on the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Political Literacy and has submitted a wide range of evidence to UK and devolved parliamentary select committees. He contribute regularly to BBC local and national media, and a range of print and broadcast media across the UK and internationally.
Andy was President of the Children’s Identities and Citizenship in Europe Association (CiCea) network (2020-22) and sit on the executive committee of the Erasmus+ funded Citizenship Education in the Context of European Values project (2020-24). He is also a trustee of Youth Focus North West, a leading regional youth work body, and have worked closely with local, regional, and national policymakers in designing and implementing youth representation bodies such as the Greater Manchester Youth Combined Authority.
Andy’s PhD, studied at the University of Salford, was a comparative study of the legacies of empire in the United Kingdom and the Russian Federation, with a focus on issues of identity, citizenship, and government. Before moving to the University of Leeds, Andy held academic positions at the University of Salford, University of Manchester, and most recently the University of Huddersfield, where he was Reader in Politics and a Director of External Engagement with responsibility for policy engagement.
Last Wednesday’s Autumn Statement saw the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, and the Treasury, publish a raft of documents that introduced new interventions designed to boost growth, or to report on complex policy challenges where the Government had commissioned research to investigate or had sought external advice.
Subject to local consultations, led by Hull City Council and the East Riding of Yorkshire Council, as well as parliamentary approval, the prospect of four MCAs being established – covering the North, South, East and West parts of the White Rose County – heralds the arrival of a fundamental stage in Yorkshire’s devolutionary journey that has been years in the making. The framework for ‘Level 4’ Devolution Deals sets out how MCAs and Mayors can apply for devolved powers over adult skills, local transport, and housing and regeneration, similar to those negotiated in the first trailblazer agreements with Greater Manchester and the West Midlands. Significantly, the Government confirms its intention to roll out single department-style settlements to all areas in England with a Devolution Deal, thus attempting to negate a long-standing critique that too much funding allocated to MCAs has been fragmented and piecemeal. In other policy areas, however, some of the proposed measures under the Level 4 Framework remain limited. For example, in education and skills, the Department for Education offers only a commitment to “consider the future role of eligible institutions in the delivery of LSIPs and the Local Skills Improvement Fund.” Whilst the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), pledge to “consult elected mayoral authorities on the development of relevant future research and innovation strategies”. UKRI will also publish regional data on its investments. Actions you might reasonably think would be undertaken already.
Responding to the news that the ‘yet to be formed’ North East MCA is about to enter negotiations for a trailblazer deal, to be concluded by spring 2024, the Yorkshire Post called on the Mayors of South and West Yorkshire to waste little time in applying for more powers and funding, but, at the same time, counselling that, “it is critical that the Mayors display a deft touch when it comes to diplomacy. They need to engage all stakeholders in a meaningful way and show that it is about collaboration and bringing everyone in the region along on the journey”. A further (welcome) illustration of the support for MCAs and Mayors to work together appears on page 10 of the Hull and East Yorkshire Devolution Deal, where the Hull and East Yorkshire MCA is encouraged to explore opportunities for further collaboration with neighbouring MCAs, and “across the whole of Yorkshire through the Yorkshire Leaders Board”. Yorkshire Universities (YU) welcomes wider and deeper devolution within and across all parts of Yorkshire. Equally, we support all Mayors in the region working together, where possible, on shared priorities and forming coalitions with each other, and with other places, on areas of mutual concern. YU stands ready to support, and to facilitate, any collaborations that our member institutions have a particular interest in forging, and where higher education has a unique contribution to make. There are some fantastic examples of Yorkshire’s universities leading, with public sector organisations and business, projects and programmes that support research and innovation, enterprise, entrepreneurship, skills, regeneration, high value sectors, and inward investment and trade. Devolution could help to accelerate and strengthen these partnerships.
Recent developments (re)confirm that the deal-making approach to devolution, and to local and regional development, is an incremental process that tests the capacity and capabilities of Whitehall and local policymakers. The arrival of the Devolution Framework, intended to guide regions on the application process for seeking new powers and funding, is a welcome step forward, and it reflects earlier calls for the development of a clearer roadmap for decentralisation in England. Yet the finances of local government – the sector that is vital to making devolution a long-term success – remain fragile, and the Autumn Statement has done little to alleviate existing budgetary pressures. According to local authority leaders, the funding squeeze is expected to increase, and it threatens to undermine efforts to boost growth in places and communities that, more than ever, need to experience and to share more in the proceeds of greater prosperity. The real risk is that what is given with one hand, is being taken away by the other…
