Starting Again

This week, I have begun a new job. I am still at the University but the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence (CaCHE) opens its doors for business. We are still recruiting and setting up systems, policies and procedures but it is finally underway.

CaCHE has been the best part of two years in the making and reflects a long gestation period as ESRC wrestled with how to deliver on its decision to prioritise housing alongside the increased focus on evidence and what works in policy terms more broadly. Eventually, the decision was taken to go for a broad-based multidisciplinary approach, one that should encompass a consortium of universities and non HEI partners. It was also clear (to us) that it needed to encompass the whole housing system and all that features within it, and that the new centre should be genuinely-UK wide and embrace the devolved UK and the different types of markets and housing contexts found across the UK.

Our consortium building process was premised on early sign–up of partners, seeking to do justice to the scope of what we thought would emerge. We embraced the housing system approach and also a pluralist basis by which to assess and review evidence about housing. Importantly, we also decided to fully commit to a co-produced mode of priority-setting. We will set our evidencing and research priorities according to what representative knowledge exchange groups up and down the country tell us are the key priorities.  More so than ever I am convinced this is the right way to go, not just to get buy-in from the wider housing policy and practice world but because it confers legitimacy and a sense of genuine collaboration. It also shapes the way we have to write, report and communicate.

Last May, the ESRC and other funding partners, Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the AHRC, published their call specification incorporating six research themes (housing and the economy; understanding the housing market; choice and aspirations; housing and health education, employment, etc.; place, design and neighbourhoods; and, multi-level governance). Each theme had a lengthy shopping list of possible research projects. We decided to ‘announce’ a dozen exemplar/learning projects either evidence reviews or secondary data analyses which would help us refine our approach to evidence reviews, alongside up to ten PhDs co-funded by the partner Universities. Beyond that our collaborative knowledge exchange model would generate our priorities.

We constructed a large team based around contributions from the universities of Glasgow, Sheffield, Reading, Heriot-Watt, Cardiff, Sheffield Hallam, Ulster, Bristol and St Andrews, plus non-HEIs: the Chartered Institute of Housing, the Royal Town Planning Institute and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research also made a major input into our bid. Subsequently, the University of Adelaide has also come on board. More than 200 individual collaborators supported out bid with an interest in working with us, as did more than 20 other partners. The submission date was in October, interviews in January 2017 and we were publically announced as the successful consortium in April and due to start at the beginning of August 2017.

And it is a large team – 30 co-investigators spread across 6 themes and 5 sub-national geographies, plus a data navigator hub, secondment programmes, early career researchers, as well  as research, knowledge exchange and administrative staff. The centre is a distributed across the UK but administered form Glasgow. Even our leadership team is spread far and wide based in Glasgow, Sheffield, London and Cardiff. As many have said, directing and leading this new initiative will be challenging but I am sure also very rewarding. I am very fortunate to have been able to work closely with Craig Watkins from the very beginning of this project and we are doubly fortunate to have so many other excellent positive colleagues to work with and to that end I would include the international advisory board we have assembled, chaired by Lord Kerslake. As is often the way with new collaborative ventures, it is great to work with new people and to see them and our practices in a different and new light.

I decided that the new centre should be a break with the past in a different way too. We are locating off the Gilmorehill campus and shifting eastward to the social sciences research hub in the east end of Glasgow at the Olympia building in Bridgeton. We will share our space with the Glasgow Centre for Population Health and other Glasgow University social scientists. I think this will bring both focus to our work and allow us to contribute to the city civically and in partnership with those we share the research hub with, as the University intends.

I will be nearly full-time in the new role so I am giving up directing Policy Scotland, something I have done since 2013. I am also standing back from What Works Scotland which I helped develop and then co-directed for three years. Both roles have been tremendously rewarding and have re-energised me. Lessons from these two entities made important contributions to what became the CaCHE model. Policy Scotland allowed me to work with policymakers, Parliament and practice and to hopefully learn a little about how to do so more effectively.  What Works Scotland has taken me into new academic areas, forced me to think much harder about collaboration, co-production and evidence. Ideas about pluralism, dialogical approaches, multi-disciplinarity and a much more open attitude to evidence has been a great tonic for someone hitherto steeped in economics methodologies (admittedly a bit more plural and heterodox than some). I am therefore very grateful to colleagues in both institutes and wish them both well in the future. Both will be working with the new housing evidence centre.

It will be a few months before we are fully operational; indeed, we are not formally launching till October. But from August 1, it will be live and I for one cannot wait to get started.  It is a new start (and feels like one) but it is also great to be forging ahead with an ESRC funded housing research centre – exactly the same type of organisation where I started my career in Glasgow in the 1980s.