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Liverpool holds the unenviable distinction to be the first UK city to lose its UNESCO World Heritage Site. Inscribed in 2004, placed on the ‘in Danger’ list in 2012 and de-listed in 2021 due to the perceived negative impact of extensive waterfront regeneration. Planning permission for the £5.5 billion Liverpool Waters project and Everton Football Club’s £500 million stadium sealed the city’s fate. This is both interesting and unusual. Firstly, very few properties appear on the ‘in Danger’ list, and prior to Liverpool, only two other sites had been de-listed since the mid-1970s. Secondly, extant knowledge indicates that European states enjoy ‘impunity’ from World Heritage Committee decisions. However,this was not the case with regards to the UK State Party and Liverpool. Throughan analysis of city planning and the ‘politics at the site’, this article problematises how and why Liverpool was controversially de-listed as a World Heritage Site. Beyond the case study, this article contributes to, and drives forward, international debates on World Heritage Sites.

The concept of brand personality is increasingly applied to the contemporary city. During the ‘Troubles’ Belfast - as a ‘pariah city’- was contaminated with a sclerotic brand personality. Recently it has been rebranded as a ‘post-conflict’ and ‘energised’ city. This paper reveals the significant transition in Belfast’s brand personality and also the tensions that exist between historical and contemporary brand personalities. Despite significant progress on destination personality and brand identity, problems remain with regards to brand image and Belfast’s contested past. In addressing the important temporal dimension, this paper adds valuable new insights into our knowledge of city brand personality.

Beveridge claimed that ‘want’ was ‘in some ways the easiest [giant] to attack’ and yet 80 years after his report was publi shed, poverty persists and indeed, has been increasing in recent years. In this article, we review both the key features of the Beveridge Report in relation to poverty and its implementation by the Labour government 1945–51, before turning to an analysis of how social security policy has changed since then. We then review changes in poverty levels since World War Two and attitudes to poverty. We conclude that Beveridge's plan helped to reduce poverty in the immediate post-war years not least because of full employment. Nevertheless, poverty was not eradicated even at this time due to low levels of wages in work and low levels of benefits out of work. Since then, a number of reforms have generally moved further away from the Beveridge plan including a renewed focus on means testing and cuts in benefit levels. These have also contributed to increased levels of poverty, particularly for those of working age in recent years.

Using the largest and richest data on savings in Great Britain, six waves of the Wealth and Assets Survey from the Office for National Statistics, we compare standard life cycle models of saving with models using more 'subjective' measures, and the added dimension of longitudinal data. Whilst the life cycle model provides a benchmark, regular criticisms remain, particularly people's propensity to continue saving at older ages. Data on attitudes attenuate that issue, and panel data largely eliminate it. Our results confirm empirically, for Great Britain, the importance of some of the objective determinants of savings included in life cycle theory. When we look at more subjective ones, we show that other factors, including self-rated health and financial pressure, provide an enhanced direct explanation of the propensity to save. Individuals who regard themselves as 'rainy day savers' tended to save more, irrespective of their demographic or financial circumstances. Results are robust to different specifications.

This article adds to and develops extant work on the comparatively under-explored but important link between religion, neoliberalism, and planning. It is noticeable that mega/giga-churches are recalibrating the religious and physical landscapes of cities around the world; in so doing they raise important implications for professional planners. We focus on Green Pastures Church in Northern Ireland. The church has initiated a significant urban development project that represents something much more than just another new church; indeed, it has been described as a ‘superchurch’. The main body of this article focuses on the three separate plans submitted to the local authority, and the attendant contentious local planning issues. Existing research exposes the problematic impact of planning decisions on religious sites for certain religious communities. Our contribution to knowledge reveals new insights concerning the more positive and supportive relationship between planning and religion. We end this article by offering insights into broader debates on the public presence of religion and how it is regulated in the contemporary city.

It is common practice for cities to be associated with celebrated sons and (sometimes) daughters. This is tied to aligning the branding process to a selected individual’s personality, achievements or celebrityhood to ‘sex up’ the city’s image. In this paper we compare and contrast the ‘museumification’ of George Best in Belfast and John Lennon in Liverpool. Our findings show, as expected, similarities in how both artists have been museumified in their respective cities; more importantly, however, we also demonstrate significant differences in how the celebrity museumification and associated landscaping has been received in Belfast and Liverpool. Firstly, it is claimed that Liverpool’s association with Lennon is based upon a ‘highly selective’ reading of his life and ‘cleaning up’ of his past; however, this is not the case with Best in Belfast. Secondly, the celebrity museumification of Lennon received widespread local support; this is not the case with Best due to an ongoing debate about his suitability as a Belfast icon. We problematise this situation and ruminate as to why Best is seemingly more divisive compared to Lennon. Beyond the spatial spotlight of Belfast and Liverpool, the findings from this paper offer insights and lessons for place branding professionals and practitioners in other cities around the world.

We present data on the proportions and seniority of female and male political scientists working in the UK. Comparing the results with previous research from 2011, we find that progress has been made. However, progress has been incremental and we find no qualitative changes in the status of female political scientists: they continue to be outnumbered by their male counterparts; they are overrepresented in the least senior job groups and underrepresented in the most senior; and the average female political scientist occupies a less senior position than the average male counterpart. We also run regression analyses to explore the impact of broader contextual factors on the proportion of female political scientists within a unit and that unit’s ‘gender seniority gap’. We find evidence that gender equality kitemarks, university mission group membership, the gender of the Head of Unit and Vice-Chancellor and the proportion of female members of university governance bodies appear to matter for one or both of these measures but not always in the direction that might be expected. These results, then, raise questions about what strategies might be pursued by those who wish to improve the status of women in the profession.

© This open access article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND). How predictable are life trajectories? We investigated this question with a scientific mass collaboration using the common task method; 160 teams built predictive models for six life outcomes using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a high-quality birth cohort study. Despite using a rich dataset and applying machine-learning methods optimized for prediction, the best predictions were not very accurate and were only slightly better than those from a simple benchmark model. Within each outcome, prediction error was strongly associated with the family being predicted and weakly associated with the technique used to generate the prediction. Overall, these results suggest practical limits to the predictability of life outcomes in some settings and illustrate the value of mass collaborations in the social sciences.

The eclectic nature of spatial planning encompasses almost every issue facing the contemporary city, from children’s diet to the planet’s future. However, it is perplexing that illegal drugs, given their deleterious spatial and social consequences, do not occupy the mindset of planners. Our study demonstrates that drugs are a planning problem. Now is the time for the international planning community, in the academe and profession, to actively engage with other academic researchers and policy makers to bolster their ‘disciplinary knowledge’ of the ‘drugs question’. This paper is a starting point in stimulating contributions from others who can assist us in driving forward this fascinating but untapped topic. This transition in planning pedagogy could facilitate a significant development in the ‘planning imagination’ and offer opportunities for ‘better planning outcomes’. The drugs-planning nexus is globally relevant, cutting edge, boundary pushing and, in a polemic style, we anticipate it will lead to a ground breaking trajectory in planning theory and practice. The insights from this study are relevant to a global audience who are interested in a high profile but as yet seriously unexplored challenge facing society and space, of which planners are the intellectual and practical custodians.

Recent interventions in planning theory discuss the merits of resilience. This paper offers a contribution to this debate through an analysis of a city embarking on its maiden resilience journey. Like other cities around the world Belfast suffers similar environmental, economic and social problems (e.g. flooding, unemployment and exclusion). However, there is a distinct uniqueness in that Belfast is still struggling with the toxic fallout from its violent socio-political history - ‘the Troubles’ - and subsequent sobriquet as a ‘post-conflict city’. Despite progress on peace and reconciliation it remains to a large extent deeply divided and socially segregated. This paper shows that illegal drugs are a ‘chronic stress’ not yet adequately analysed in local resilience deliberations, and claims that until this is properly problematised then Belfast’s future Resilience Strategy will struggle to deliver transformative change for the areas adversely affected. We are also concerned that a predictable policy agenda scripted by influential voices renders this pressing priority of the city’s silent citizens unheard in Belfast’s resilience discussions. To combat this, we suggest that sentiment platforms would prove to be a more effective participatory method for planning in lending life to the ‘lived experiences’ of those impacted by the drugs problem.

Where female representatives are located within legislatures and what they do matters for the substantive representation of women. Previous scholarship has found that female parliamentary committee members participate differently than their male counterparts in relation to both policy area and status of positions held. Here, we draw on an original time-series data set (n= 9,767) to analyze the U.K. select committee system. We test for the impact of four variables previously found to be important in explaining changes in gendered divisions of labor: the system of appointment/election, the proportion of female representatives in the legislature, sharp increases in the number of female representatives, and changes in government from right-wing parties to left-wing parties. We find that horizontal and vertical divisions of labor persist over time and that membership patterns in the United Kingdom mainly correspond to those found elsewhere. Moreover, there is little evidence that any of the four variables have systematically affected membership patterns.

Despite legislative reform in the last five years aimed at giving non-resident parents (NRPs) official rights to ‘involvement’ in the lives of their children, the UK has not enacted a presumption of ‘50/50’ shared care. The emphasis on individual arrangements follows an overall policy trend toward privatization of family disputes. The little data that exists suggests that the UK lags behind other countries in numbers of separated or divorced couples engaging in shared care, though the actual prevalence and practice of shared care in the UK is difficult to assess for several reasons: definitions of shared care range from 50/50 living arrangements to less definitive timeshares; data on shared parenting practices are relatively rare and fragmented; and it is too early to assess the impact of the new legislative presumption of ‘parental involvement’ on judicial decisions. This article outlines the recent legislative changes, examines the available information on post-separation contact and shared care, highlights the (large) gaps in the data and suggests reasons for these gaps and ways to address them, and concludes with observations on the importance of robust data. Key points: • UK legislators recently considered the option of a presumption of 50/50 residence after separation, but finally decided on an imprecise presumption that both parents be involved in the care of the child. • The ‘presumption of parental involvement’ fails to define shared care in terms of time divisions or residence arrangements • UK policy and legislation on post-separation child arrangements and child maintenance emphasize private arrangements without state intervention; only 10% of couples go to court for child arrangements and these are considered ‘high-conflict’. • Data on shared care practices in the UK are sparse and difficult to analyze – reflecting a lack of definitional clarity in policy, and poor measurement in existing studies. • Estimates of the incidence of shared care range from 3–17%, although the accounts of parents with care (PWC) suggest that 50/50 arrangements could be as low as 1%. • There appears to have been no substantial increase in shared care over the last decade, but the impact of recent legislative changes has yet to be assessed and better data is needed. • The UK has some way to go in strengthening the evidence base around patterns of post-separation parenting.

The 2010 Wright Reforms are the most significant changes to the Select Committee system in the UK House of Commons since their inauguration in their modern form in 1979. We use interrupted time series techniques (ARIMA) to test the impact of the Wright Report on the level of parliamentarians’ engagement with those Select Committees covered by the Wright Reforms using proxy measures of membership attendance and turnover rates. We find little or no evidence that the Wright Report had an impact on these outcomes. In light of these findings, we argue that some of the claims made regarding the successes of Select Committees and the Wright Reforms are overblown or, at least, premature and inadequately supported by evidence, and that further reforms may be needed if the aims of the Wright Committee are to be realised more fully.

Committees are important vehicles for parliamentary careers both as means to a (ministerial) end and as an end in themselves. This article explores the relationship between select committee membership and parliamentary career by analysing committee membership and frontbench appointments for the 2130 Members of Parliament (MPs) first elected since 1979. We focus on two of Donald Searing’s four informal backbench roles—Policy Advocates and Parliament Men and Women—and three of the four formal leadership roles—Whips, Junior Ministers and Ministers. The membership patterns of select committees suggest that MPs approach this aspect of their parliamentary work in different ways concomitant with the roles of Generalist and Specialist Policy Advocates and Good House of Commons Men and Women. The membership patterns also suggest that different groups of MPs—by party, gender and ethnicity—often (choose or are forced to) approach committee work in different ways. We also find membership of some committees is more strongly associated with leadership roles than others.

We investigated the association between bisphosphonate treatment and the risk of stroke using a large routine clinical dataset. We found no association between bisphosphonate treatment and risk of stroke, after adjusting for large number of clinical and demographic confounders. INTRODUCTION:There is conflicting evidence on the link between bisphosphonates and stroke with studies variously showing increased, decreased or unchanged risk. We investigated the association between bisphosphonate treatment and the risk of stroke using a large routine clinical dataset. METHODS:We used a matched nested case-control study design analysing routinely collected electronic data from patients registered at primary care practices in England participating in the Royal College of General Practitioners Research and Surveillance Centre. Cases were patients aged 18 years or over, either living or dead, recorded as having had a stroke in the period 1 January 2005 to 31 March 2016. Each case was matched to one control according to age, sex, general practice attended and calendar time. Data were analysed using Stata, version 14.2. and RStudio, version 1.1.463. Conditional logistic regression was used to determine odds ratios for stroke according to bisphosphonate treatment and duration in cases compared with controls. We adjusted for disease risk groups, cardiovascular risk factors, treatments, smoking status, alcohol consumption, ethnicity, bisphosphonate types, fracture and socioeconomic status using IMD (Index of Multiple Deprivation). RESULTS:We included 31,414 cases of stroke with an equal number of matched controls. Overall, 83.2% of cases and controls were aged 65 years or older, and there were similar proportions of females (51.5%) and males (48.5%). Bisphosphonate treatment was not associated with stroke after adjusting for the wide range of confounders considered (OR 0.86, 95% CI 0.62-1.19). CONCLUSIONS:We found no association between bisphosphonate treatment and risk of stroke, after adjusting for other confounders.

Linking survey responses and the electoral register is a core part of data collection in political science. This experiment shows that there is no difference in consent rates if the motivation for data linkage is changed to a more truthful one. This is encouraging for researchers of registration and turnout; survey respondents do not object to their data being linked for checking potential errors in their reporting. It also is consistent with the idea that consent to link survey data to information from the electoral register is driven by a consideration of the linkage itself, rather than being overly reliant on question wording. This view is supported by the additional finding that there is also no difference in the rates of opt-out consent between two alternate motivations. The second finding at this stage is that far fewer people opt out of consent than refuse their consent when they are asked to opt in.

Intra-European migrants reported lower job satisfaction levels than native workers, in three rounds of the European Social Survey. This deficit was also experienced by their descendants (the second generation), despite the latter generation achieving native levels of household income. At least some part of these lower levels of jobs satisfaction was associated with a clustering into lower-productivity industries. There are striking gender differences in experiences: among men the first generation is just as likely to be satisfied with their jobs as the ‘native’ population, whilst it is the second generation who are less likely to achieve job satisfaction. For women, both generations experienced a deficit in job satisfaction. This may reflect changing expectations of work among men, and integration for women, across generations and contrasts with general ‘assimilation’ for incomes received. The country of origin, within Europe, did not seem to be associated with levels of job satisfaction.

This paper draws upon an analysis of operational planning to highlight the centrality of ethics in praxis. In this context, political liberalism is particularly helpful in developing a deeper understanding of the activities of those engaged in planning decision making. At the most basic level, it demonstrates the importance of not only using shared liberal values as the foundation for public discourses, but also achieving consensus through the development of an inclusive evidence base, derived from both lay and professional knowledge. Though it has limitations, political liberalism provides a practical critique, enabling judgements to be made on problems which pervade operational planning practice and an evaluation to be conducted of the dynamic between, and actions of, participants.

This paper responds to demands for greater academic investigation into environmental protection, specifically the practical and structural problems which underpin regulatory compliance in the planning system. It critiques traditional theories of regulation and answers calls for the development of a thematic lens to facilitate the scrutiny of not only operational practice, but also the broader institutional regime. An empirical investigation builds upon the construct of really responsive regulation to study planning control and it becomes apparent that not only are there significant procedural planning difficulties facing regulatory compliance, but also that a much wider raft of issues must be considered if the complex equation is to be solved. The findings demonstrate how theory can be applied to enrich our rudimentary understanding of deep-seated problems and foster insights into areas of structural importance which are relevant to both planning and the wider regulatory arena.

Any child support regime necessarily makes policy choices about how parental income should be shared between the two parental households. Those choices involve balancing the claims of the child, the claims of the custodial parent for help with the expense of providing for the child, and the claims of the support obligor for autonomy in deciding how to spend his own earnings. That balancing task is complicated by the fact that the child and the custodial parent necessarily share a living standard, so that any child support transfer, large or small, will unavoidably benefit the custodial parent as well as the child. This article reports the findings of an empirical study designed to reveal how the British public believe this balance should be struck. It then compares the public’s preferred policies to the policy choices implicit in the current UK child support schedule. It concludes that there are important gaps between the two, and recommends that consideration be given to amending the current UK law to better align it with the public’s values on these matters.