Bradford City Council is embedding research directly into its policymaking, treating evidence as a routine tool for decisions on housing, education, employment, and social services rather than an afterthought. This matters because Bradford has some of the lowest healthy life expectancy in England, with health outcomes heavily shaped by factors outside the clinic—jobs, housing, air quality, and community connections. The council currently lacks the infrastructure to systematically generate and use research on these wider determinants. The project builds a permanent unit within local government that commissions, conducts, and applies studies in partnership with universities, community groups, and regional agencies. If successful, the collaboration will shift how a major UK city allocates its budget and designs services. Decisions on new housing developments, school meal programmes, or transport links could be tested against local health data before money is spent. The council expects to save public funds by avoiding ineffective interventions, while producing a model other local authorities can adopt. The work also links health, education, social care, and economic datasets into a single platform—a technical change that could reveal hidden patterns, such as how childhood poverty in one ward predicts adult hospital admissions decades later.
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Summary of our vision: Our vision is for Bradford Council to be a local authority leader in generating and using research evidence to support decision making and democratic accountability. High quality research will lie at the heart of policy formulation, be sustained by investment in resources, skills and capacity, and will be informed by collaboration and co-production with partners and communities. It will have lasting positive impacts on poor health and inequalities in Bradford and beyond, supporting world class research on wider determinants of health and contributing to a stronger international evidence base. Background: Bradford is the UK’s youngest city, with more than a quarter of people aged under 18 and is among its most diverse; 36% of people are from ethnic minorities and over 150 languages are spoken here. Bradford has high levels of poor health and some of the lowest healthy life expectancy in England. Our health outcomes are heavily influenced by wider determinants and we want to be able to make better informed and more cost-effective decisions to improve services and deliver the greatest positive impact on health outcomes for our communities. Aims and objectives: Our aim is to develop an HDRC that delivers the infrastructure and culture needed to support collaborative health determinants research. Our objectives are to: 1. Create sustainable infrastructure for developing and delivering co-produced research. 2. Incorporate research as a routine part of policy making built on a shared and co-produced research agenda. 3. Unite broad interdisciplinary expertise from collaborating research institutions. 4. Develop and consolidate the use of new methods for health determinants research. 5. Provide efficient system-wide platforms linking health, educational, social and economic data. 6. Build health determinants researcher and research user capacity in local government. To meet these objectives, the HDRC will deliver five functions: • Reviews of research evidence · Data and information management and supporting decisions · Building capacity to use and do research · Management and monitoring of research · Co-production with communities and local stakeholders Collaborations and partnerships: Our HDRC will be supported by key and varied collaborations and partnerships including our regional combined authority partners, local agencies and VCSE organisations, our communities, partnerships with six leading academic organisations, the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, and NIHR infrastructure and programmes. Timeline and milestones: Our project timetable and milestones are based around five functions and their actions and success measures. They also reflect the momentum from existing work and the ambition of our proposed HDRC. Impact and dissemination: We are ambitious and want to see the development of a mature research system embedded in the council so that key decisions around policy and new investments are informed by evidence. We will include embedded evaluation and will report short, medium and long term impacts. We will share our learning and knowledge locally, regionally, nationally and internationally to contribute to the wider determinant evidence base. We recognise the need to inform audiences which are not generally research active and will work with our elected members and communities to co-design clear, concise and accessible communications so that outputs are relevant, culturally sensitive and useful.
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