A national consortium of universities, policy experts, and local organisations is building a central hub to turn fragmented local experiments in public service reform into a coherent, evidence-based playbook for the whole of the UK. The problem is that local councils, health authorities, and community groups across the country often try similar fixes to shared problems—poverty, housing, transport, skills gaps—but rarely learn systematically from one another. Good ideas stay local. Bad ideas get repeated. This hub aims to close that gap by linking local "policy innovation partnerships" with national policymakers, so that what works in one place can be tested, adapted, and scaled elsewhere. If successful, the hub will change how government and universities work together. Instead of researchers publishing papers that nobody reads, they will co-design services with the people who use them—citizens, civil servants, frontline staff. The result could be better-targeted public spending, fewer failed pilot programmes, and policies that actually fit the specific needs of towns and cities across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The hub will also train a new generation of researchers and practitioners skilled in place-based problem-solving.
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This 44-month project will establish "LPIP Strategic Co-ordination Hub - What Works Centre for Place" as the Local Policy Innovation Partnership (LPIP) Strategic Co-ordination Hub. This will involve bringing together a network of people/organisations who have successfully delivered on place partnerships, engagement, impact, and translational research. The Hub is a national consortium, led by the University of Birmingham, convening stakeholders across the research and policy ecosystem. It is concerned with drawing together understanding of local challenges, and formulating solutions, across the UK through an innovative and effective service-driven approach to place-based policy making and public service delivery. It is designed to lead to a step-change in the quality and impact of the evidence created by universities and their local place partners. Our approach is based on extending and accelerating learning UK-wide from the successful and highly regarded place-based West Midlands Regional Economic Development Institute (WMREDI) partnership. The delivery team will be led by a leadership team, comprising staff from the University of Birmingham, the University of the West of England and Inner Circle Consulting (non-academic Co-Investigator) and a wider network team of 13 delivery partners (a mix of academics and non-academics from different geographical areas and with contrasting thematic specialisms) with a track record of rigorous high-quality engaged research relevant to local policy and practice. The Hub will work with local LPIPs and partnership communities in their places, embedding co-design and co-production. It will develop a programme of capacity-building activities looking at the thematic challenges places face and what works in place partnerships. It will respond to the needs of LPIPs and government. An Advisory Board made up of government and the wider place ecosystem partners and research assets will champion and guide the delivery of the Hive and the broader LPIP programme, as well as peer reviewing applications for funding from the Hub. The Hub will: - Tackle the gap in linking the 'local' with the 'national' in policy development by linking with policy makers at different geographical scales and across policy domains. - Model and scale up innovative and effective practice and deepen the collective knowledge base, so cultivating common purpose and collective intelligence in meeting the needs of places in all parts of the UK. - Act as a front door to national policy stakeholders - Use a 'service' mindset, which starts from the needs of users and designs products and services with their active involvement. - Use a careful balance of intellectual ambition (curiosity to understand what works) with engagement expertise to create the conditions for purposeful partnership working across different constituencies, including LPIP teams, policy makers, researchers, and citizens. - Provide training, secondment and learning opportunities. - Assess the transferability of methods and findings across the LPIP network (and beyond). The Hub will be successful if it has helped shape and grow a thriving place ecosystem that is: - addressing the challenge of making local places 'successful'; and where - government (nationally and sub-nationally) is working with the Hub to share data and enhance policy approaches to take account of place needs; and - UKRI and stakeholders see the LPIP programme pathway as an effective way of expanding place-based activities and programmes.
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