Housing policy across the UK is being shaped by a new evidence centre that brings together nine universities, professional institutes, and charities to co-produce research with policymakers and practitioners. The problem is that housing decisions—on affordability, supply, quality, and homelessness—are often made without a robust, independent evidence base that works across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. CaCHE fills this gap by creating a UK-wide network that systematically reviews existing research, identifies priorities, and generates new studies in direct collaboration with non-academic stakeholders like Shelter, Crisis, and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. If successful, CaCHE will change how housing policy is made. Instead of piecemeal or politically driven decisions, local authorities, housing associations, and national governments will have access to rigorous, co-produced evidence on what actually works. This could improve the quality and affordability of housing for millions of people, reduce homelessness, and make the housing system more efficient—a system that quietly underpins health, employment, and family stability. The centre also plans to become self-financing after five years, aiming for lasting influence rather than a one-off project.
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The Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence (CaCHE) will be an independent, multi-disciplinary and multi-sector consortium of academic and non-academic stakeholders. CaCHE will be UK-wide in coverage (across all four nations and at different spatial scales within), as well as UK-level in focus. It will advance knowledge and improve the evidence base for both housing policy and practice in all parts of the U.K. CaCHE will be organised as a "hub and spoke" network with its administrative core in Glasgow and a physical presence in all 5 sub-national knowledge exchange hubs in Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales & the South West, the North & Midlands, and London, East & South East. Additionally, our six research themes will cross cut the different geographies depending on relevancy and appropriateness. The management team will be responsible for overall strategy, operational delivery, co-ordination, data navigation, research and KE. The management team of three academics (Gibb, Watkins and Orford) will be supplemented by a senior non-academic lead on knowledge exchange and communications (Smart), plus a full time programme manager, KE and communications, administrative and technical support staff. The evidence centre and its management team will be accountable to a funders group and an international advisory board. The main consortium members are the Universities of Glasgow, Sheffield, Bristol, Cardiff, Ulster, Reading, Sheffield Hallam, St. Andrews and Heriot-Watt, along with the National Institute of Social and Economic Research, CIH, RICS and the RTPI. The consortium has a lengthy list of institutional and individual collaborators at regional and national level and our activity will be supported 'in kind' and direct contributions from additional partners including Crisis, the Wheatley Group, NatCen, Shelter, Rightmove and several more. Our consortium also has specific project plans with four complementary ESRC investments: Urban Big Data Centre, What Works Scotland, Public Policy Institute for Wales, and the ADRC-Scotland, and will seek to collaborate with others including the What Works Centre for Wellbeing. Initially, a five year programme, CaCHE will seek to become self-financing sustained beyond this period. It will do so by regular scanning of opportunities with partners, and by also being impactful and influential through a combination of rigorous evidencing, prioritised across six research themes, which in turn will generate a new primary research agenda to be prosecuted by the evidence centre. A key way in which relevance and credibility will be sustained is through the comprehensive nature and persistence of our knowledge exchange and collaborative working with non-academic stakeholders. We will repeatedly utilise an innovative collaborative working practice - the Tobin Project Process - in order to build a consensus through rigorous and intensive examination of the key questions and priorities exercising non-academic partners and our stakeholders nationally and in each region. In this way, we will co-produce our evidence review and research strategy priorities and will fully engage, mobilise and disseminate findings with academic and particularly non-academic groups through our network of networks (i.e. drawing on existing networks of contacts via our non-academic and academic partners). CaCHE will promote and support interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary work and invest in knowledge exchange training for staff to maximise the impact of our multiple dissemination channels: non-technical briefing, summaries, academic and trade publications, targeted technical reports, high standard non technical international evidence review, blog posts, tweets, audio and visual pod casts, roadshows, seminars, conferences, workshops and media contributions. The evidence centre will support an extensive programme of staff secondments, promoting mobility between the academy and the policy and practice communi
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