This project will develop an operationally and technically viable approach to cargo threat investigation. The main aim of the project is to provide a real-time dynamic passive profiling technique to assist Border Control Agencies and has the potential to improve hit rates; i.e. to improve targeting the people that carry contraband and hence ensure less is entering the UK.To be specific, the real-time dynamic passive profiling technique will be based on the modelling of facial expressions, eye movement and pupil changes in both the visual and thermal domains and link these to malicious intent and physiological processes (such as blood flow, eye movement patterns, and pupil dilation). To facilitate this process, one of the initial aspects of the project will be the collection, analysis and development of the dataset used to model the baseline of facial imagery behaviour of the general population against which physiological behaviours in people with malicious intent would need to be detected. Both the baseline and the dynamic profiling will be based on the response to a series of questions. The developed techniques will be evaluated in operational trails at border control points. The multi-modal facial analysis will provide additional information to the current profiling and the developed techniques will have a wider remit into other domains. It is envisioned that this will be easily integrated into the current process.There are three main challenges:a) to determine the facial/eye features, in combination with psychological profiling, to provide robust baselines that can be linked to malicious intent,b) to develop and combine the various dynamic real-time facial models (visual expression, thermal, eye movement) related to intent, andc) to evaluate the developed system within different environments, ranging from airport to port based border control points.

Women who work in the lap dancing industry are stigmatised and often exploited by unregulated working environments making the work precarious, unstable and potentially unsafe. Aside from moral opinions regarding how they earn money, thousands of women each night in the UK are taking part in exotic dance to earn a living. The conditions under which they work are mostly unregulated, as current regulation focuses on the premises and the external aspects of regulation such as fire regulations, door security and selling alcohol. How the dancers experience their jobs is currently not considered a regulatory concern. In a recent ESRC project involving a large scale survey of 200 dancers and follow up interviews with 30 dancers and 60 other people involved in the industry (club managers, owners, door staff, 'house mums', health and safety officers, police, licensing officers etc), we exposed the motivations for dancing and their experiences as self employed independent contractors. This research is innovative as it moves away from the existing literature on lap dancing which focuses on the identities and emotional management strategies of the dancers and their relationships with the customers. For the first time, this research project examines the dancers experiences as workers. Two important themes came out of the research. First, that the status of 'self employed' is misleading. Financial exploitation from management was a concern expressed by participants: fees paid to work in the club were often high, along with random fines, internal tipping systems, and the threat of instant dismissal. Safety inside the clubs, especially in private closed-off spaces was another concern for some participants. Working long hours throughout the night with few facilities or a space to rest and refresh were the kinds of issues that dancers felt made their jobs difficult. Secondly, the majority of dancers were young, single women under 30 years of age, and were also in other forms of low paid jobs (such as retail, beauty, and bar work) and/or were also studying. The group who mainly used dancing as their sole income were migrant women. For all of the participants, dancing was considered a highly flexible job but at the same time could not be relied on due to the volatile and unstable nature of the industry. Therefore dancing was used strategically to manoeuvre out of precarious employment prospects and to build a more secure and financially stable future. The researchers believe that these two findings can be acted upon and made relevant to policy and practice in an attempt to improve the working conditions for the women who work in the clubs. This proposed project comes at a time when there has been some new laws introduced in 2010 to govern the way in which lap dancing clubs operate and change how they are licensed. This programme of work will take key research findings forward to a non-academic audience made up of policy makers, licensing practitioners, unions and industry members who can act upon them and improve standards through the licensing processes. The project will work with the HM Revenue & Customs to provide education and workplace rights information to dancers regarding paying tax and the benefits of doing so. Information in an accessible form will be given to unions and representative groups who can take forward this campaign for better working conditions. Partnership work will also be conducted with West Yorkshire Police Community Safety Team to develop safety information and a clear line of reporting incidents. To do this we will write five bespoke briefing papers and create two visual summaries so that the findings from the research can be understood without dense text and statistics. In all of our activities dancers will be consulted and integrated into the planning and delivery of the activities to ensure that their input shapes the materials created. A website will allow these materials to be permanently available.

Current cargo screening systems are sub-optimal because they are based on historic layouts, for instance luggage will go through fixed tiered systems: First all luggage will go through detector A, if it fails to pass, then it will go through detector B and if it fails again through detector C. Moreover, we do not understand the performance of current systems as no baseline performance data is available, i.e. it is unclear whether current systems perform better than random or not. Thus even if an improvement was proposed, it would be difficult to measure its impact if any.We are proposing to design a plug and play software tool (cargo screening system simulator) that will map the right technology to the right commodity / threat combination and thus* Identify gaps in a current sensor system set-up / what new technology do we need?* Allow for proper evaluation of new sensor technology / is it value for money?* Optimise given resources / get highest throughput / detection for fixed resources.Additionally, as the project is interested in the whole system and allows for the evaluation of new technologies, it is an enabling project for all other sandpit projects. We will be able to evaluate new sensor technologies proposed in specific scenarios to establish practical cost / benefits. To achieve this, we propose to run a follow on network alongside the project.

The tax and benefit system and education finance regime alter the value of human capital investments (e.g. education) by treating up-front costs, forgone earnings and future returns differently, and by insuring against earnings risk. In so doing, they affect the incentive to invest in human capital compared with not investing, and compared with other kinds of investment, such as financial investments. These are potentially important distortions that policymaking needs to take into account. The overall aim of this project is to use Understanding Society and British Household Panel Survey data, together with lifecycle modelling techniques, to provide new evidence on how the returns to human capital investments are distorted by actual and hypothetically-reformed UK tax and benefit systems and education finance regimes (including those in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland). To that end, we will address the following research questions: - How are investments in human capital taxed? - How do tax rates vary across different population subgroups and stages of life? - How effectively do taxes, benefits and the education finance regime insure against uncertainty in returns? - How do these features vary under different policy environments? - How do behavioural responses affect these results? Although some work has been done in this area, there remains much about the way that the tax and benefit system and education finance regime treat human capital investments that we do not know. Existing work has the common disadvantage that it is all for example individuals in idealised settings. This means there is limited consideration of variation across individuals, no attention paid to uncertainty, rudimentary modelling of taxes and benefits and no allowance for the behavioural effect of policies. These are important limitations, which our proposed approach will address. We will consider two types of human capital investment - education and labour market experience - and use two measures of how investments in human capital are taxed - an effective tax rate (ETR) and a participation tax rate (PTR). The ETR measures how much the internal rate of return to investment is affected by taxes, benefits and subsidies. This is the measure that has been used previously to describe, e.g. how the tax system treats the return to saving held in different assets. The PTR describes what proportion of the return to investment is lost due to higher taxes and lower benefits, possibly offset by subsidies. This has been widely used in the literature on financial work incentives. Our analysis will be for the UK and will be based on the Understanding Society and British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) datasets, supplemented with published data on educational spending per pupil from Government departments and agencies (e.g. the Education Funding Agency) and previous IFS work, and information about education-related expenses from the Student Income and Expenditure Survey. In the first stage of the project, we will use these data to produce descriptive analysis of employment, earnings and human capital investment costs. In the second stage, we will use the data and the results of the first stage to estimate how investments in human capital are taxed. This will be based on a lifecycle model of education, employment and saving choices that will allow us to calculate the ETRs and PTRs described above. This research represents a significant advance over the current literature, providing accurate and detailed estimates of the tax rates on investment in human capital and developing a methodology that can be applied in other settings. We also anticipate having significant impact on policymakers, improving understanding over how the tax and benefit system and education finance regime affect incentives to accumulate human capital, and affecting future policy decisions. We will exploit project partners in BIS and HMRC to ensure these impacts are realised.

The geopolitical and geo-economic shifts we are experiencing have stress-tested the national security and resilience of the United Kingdom. The consequences of EU Exit, COVID-19, Russia's invasion of Ukraine and other events of national importance, have coalesced around three global challenges that will shape the future direction of our economy and society; energy security, climate change and cyber security. Our world is characterised by high degrees of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA); this context means that emergencies will be much greater in frequency and are likely to have far reaching consequences for our national economy. It is therefore essential for the UK to ensure adopt a sophisticated and nuanced approach to our understanding and communication of risk. If we are to enhance resilience and security through improved risk management, it follows that the doctrine of 'prevention rather than cure' should guide policy wherever possible. However, the intractable problem of recognising and quantifying the value of good risk management is omnipresent. We believe that risk management is the antecedent to a robust resilience system; it is the glue which connects central government, the devolved administrations, local authorities, and the private and third sectors. Risk intelligence is crucial to effective decision-making, this is particularly important in the context of emergency and crisis situations that require government to adopt a radically different 'operating rhythm' and where decisions and actions occur at pace. In response, the 'Government Risk Profession' was launched in 2021 to advance professionalism, effectiveness and efficiency in the way risk is managed. It is clear that a socio-technical systems approach that recognises resilience as an interacting set of sub-systems at both social and technical levels is crucial to adopting a human-centred approach that aligns will the Integrated Reviews' recognition of the 'professionalism and commitment of the people who contribute to our resilience' Our proposal for a new coordination hub (SALIENT) to support the UK's contribution to building a secure and resilient world will focus the UK's research effort on national resilience through the lens of human centred systems-thinking. Our five-year programme of research will deliver a portfolio of evidence and insight to support central and local governmental actions and ultimately strengthen the UK's resilience to civil contingencies and threats. Our human-centred approach, informed by a distinctly anthropological perspective, will enable SALIENT to identify and articulate the systemic changes that are needed to strengthen resilience. We know that resilience requires a 'whole of society' mindset; this means organising our social order and government in ways that enhances transparency, leadership and promotes greater accountability. The mere notion of a resilience-focused outlook requires consideration of how we use 'futures' to engage citizens in ways that empower their communities. It follows that the research to underpin this effort must be of the highest quality in terms of originality, methodological richness and impact. SALIENT will provide the means to coordinate research actions across a broad spectrum of disciplines and sectors and deliver evidence that will shape the UK's response to the increasingly complex threat landscape.