About us

The Local Policy Innovation Partnership (LPIP) Hub seeks to address nationwide issues through local partnership and place.

LPIP Hub logoBy working with local LPIPs, the Hub aims understand and solve local challenges around the UK through innovative and effective service-driven approach to place-based policy making and public service delivery. The LPIP Hub is designed to lead to a step-change in the quality and impact of the evidence created by universities and their local place partners.

The Hub has £3.6 million from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Innovate UK. It is a national consortium, led by the University of Birmingham, convening stakeholders across the research and policy ecosystem. The project will run until the end of 2026.

Programme of work 

The LPIP Hub 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.

The Hub will:

  • Tackle the gap in linking the 'local' with the 'national' in policy development by linking with policy makers geographical scales and across policy domains
  • Model and scale up innovative and effective practice and deepen the collective knowledge base, cultivating a 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). 

What does success look like? 

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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