Policy Development Group

The skills and experience of the School of Geography's Policy Development Group mean that it is ideally placed to benefit from the increasing emphasis on 'evidence-led' policy development in public agencies together with the stronger role for empirical analyses in social sciences identified by ESRC.

Aims

Our aim is to support development of our research into the structure of deprivation and the development of rural areas, and rural policy, in the UK.

The South East Regional Research Laboratory supports large-scale applied projects, often linked to our expertise in the application of geographical information systems and other forms of numerical analysis.

Projects

We aim to build research activity in this group around long-term rather than short-term projects, allowing greater opportunities to translate applied research results into academic publications as well as major government research reports:

• Defra's Rural Evidence Research Centre has an initial budget of £1.5 million over the next three years. Geography at Birkbeck will be the central hub of a national network of research collaborators undertaking specialist research projects on issues of key importance to the development of rural policy in England. Current collaborators are based in the Universities of Sheffield, Aberystwyth, Birmingham and Robert Gordon, Aberdeen together with the Institute of Education within the University of London.

Members of the group are also currently involved in:

• studies of rural services and childcare (for the Countryside Agency)
• refining the definition of urban and rural areas in England and Wales (for Defra, ODPM, ONS and the Countryside Agency).

Academic Staff

• Dr Martin Frost