Our Work Packages

The LEAF project comprises four interconnected work packages addressing the root causes of economic inactivity, whether that be disability or poor health, informal caring responsibilities and/or skills gaps:

Work package 1 (“Local Stakeholder Insight”) trials Community Innovation Teams (CITs) as an approach for bringing together community organisations, employers, housing associations, health providers, co-researchers with lived experience and other stakeholders working on tackling barriers to economic activity from different perspectives. CITs will collect community insights (with co-researcher support), review routine local data and conduct root cause analyses to identify the underlying causes of economic inactivity at a local level. The CITs will then develop and implement local innovation plans and see if they are effective.

Lead: Miriam Taegtmeyer, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (Miriam.Taegtmeyer@lstmed.ac.uk)

Work package 2 (“Evidence Reviews and Data Benchmarking”) brings together insights from academic literature on economic inactivity and administrative data. Through key informant interviews, literature reviews, and existing datasets, the team will identify the causes and consequences of economic inactivity for local communities. Within this, the team explores how place-based and systemic factors interact to shape health, disability, and informal care-driven economic inactivity in the UK. The key output of this work package will be a report identifying blind spots in the existing evidence base, and an analysis of economic inactivity and it’s causes in local authorities across the UK.

Lead: Phil McHale, Univerity of Liverpool (hlpmchal@liverpool.ac.uk)

Work package 3 (“Tools to Support Research and Policy”)  engages policymakers and researchers both locally and nationally to develop tools which translate insights from earlier work packages into action. We will work with national stakeholders to develop a plan for harnessing administrative data to drive new and novel research into economic inactivity. We will also develop tools for local communities to help bridge the research-to-practice gap, putting data and evidence reviews into the hands of local communities to drive sustainable change.

Lead: Ian Burn, University of Liverpool (ian.burn@liverpool.ac.uk)

Work Package 4 (“Embedding Change”)  brings together insights from our work packages to develop a local research agenda and theory of change to reduce economic inactivity in the Liverpool City Region. We will work to impact the way stakeholders across the city region seek to reduce barriers to employment. Through workshops, roundtables, and white papers, we aim to strengthen the capacity of industry, local employers, and community organisations to understand evidence and identify gaps, which is crucial for driving the research agenda on economic inactivity in local communities from the bottom up.

Lead: Becky Jones-Phillips, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (Becky.Jones-Phillips@lstmed.ac.uk)

For questions, contact Ian Burn (ian.burn@liverpool.ac.uk), LEAF Principal Investigator

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