Dr Peter O’Brien, YU Executive Director The Labour Party has won a landslide in the General Election. Sir Keir Starmer, a University of Leeds graduate, becomes the country’s 58th Prime Minister, and Rachel Reeves, MP for Leeds West and Pudsey, is the first female Chancellor of the Exchequer. Yorkshire Universities (YU) congratulates the Labour Party, …
Five Key Asks from the 2024 Mayoral Elections in Yorkshire Twelve universities and higher education institutions in Yorkshire today issued a powerful open letter to the region’s mayoral election candidates outlining five ‘key asks’ to ensure the county is a place to “invest, live, work and learn”. Ahead of mayoral elections on 2 May 2024, …
Yorkshire Universities (YU) Executive Director, Dr Peter O’Brien, has written to the leaders of Hull and East Riding of Yorkshire councils to respond to the public consultation on the Hull and East Yorkshire Devolution Deal. You can read the full open letter below, which outlines YU’s support for continuing devolution across Yorkshire and the potential …
Professor Jamie Morgan, Leeds Beckett University The last general election took place in December 2019, and government must call another one within five years or Parliament is automatically dissolved, and the latest that can happen is 17 December 2024, which means the latest an election can be held is the end of January 2025. Given …
Dr Peter O’Brien, YU Executive Director 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. One …
The YU ‘Innovation in Conversation’ webinar was organised as part of the 2022 West Yorkshire Innovation Festival on 4 October 2022. The webinar focussed on discussing solutions and approaches to the following two main questions: In 2023, we used the material we recorded in 2022 to draw out some key messages and case studies that …
New job! I’m now a Y-PERN fellow, officially based in the Management School at Sheffield University, but mostly working with the South Yorkshire Combined Mayoral Authority (SYMCA, pronounced by folk who work there as ‘sim-ka’). 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.
Marina Tapley, Policy and Research Officer at Yorkshire Universities In April 2023, Yorkshire Universities (YU) held a joint roundtable on Opportunities for students and graduates within local government organisations. This roundtable brought together careers staff from the universities and recruitment and HR staff from local government to explore potential for further collaboration and coordination around …
Place-based approaches to policymaking seem to be gaining momentum in the UK. Whether people think it is cost-effective or feel it is just the right thing to do, the fact is that, over the last few years, there has been an increased interest in understanding the interconnections and relationships within a place and how working together can have a broader, deeper, and lasting change for the community. Within this context, in Hull and East Yorkshire, we have invited policymakers, academics and people with lived experience to sit at the same table, reflect on their role and take action and responsibility for improving the quality of life of their communities. In so doing, we have three underlying assumptions.
Elizabeth Sanderson and Dr Jamie Redman, Y-PERN Policy Fellows (South Yorkshire), at the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research, Sheffield Hallam University Over the last few decades, the UK has seen a rise in low quality work (Goos and Manning, 2007). These are jobs which are broadly defined as low-skilled, low-paid, insecure and more …