Have you factored independent evaluation into your retrofit funding bid?

As councils and organisations get ready to apply for Wave 3 of the Warm Homes: Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund, it’s useful to examine the critical role of behaviour in both intervention success and M&E design. Our research for the Department for Energy Security & Net Zero has shown that effective retrofitting goes beyond physical upgrades. It requires understanding of the behavioural and socio-economic factors that influence residents’ engagement and satisfaction.

For the first of two blogs, our Behavioural Economist, Leanne Kelly shares her tips to improve retrofit outcomes; by gathering household insights early, tailoring engagement strategies, and designing projects with co-benefits in mind. This kind of robust, behaviour-informed M&E is key to better outcomes, and scaling retrofit efforts much more efficiently across social housing.

As an innovation company owned by a local authority, and with the trials, engagement and monitoring and evaluation (M&E) work we do in communities, we understand the place-based, practical, and behavioural elements to schemes like the Warm Homes: Social Housing Fund, which is open for Wave 3 applications.

Our Complex-to-Decarbonise (CTD) work with UCL for the Department for Energy Security & Net Zero, for example, helped surface and evidence challenges and solutions for retrofit work. It gave a holistic picture of the complex challenge. The output of the work was an identification framework that integrated the physical, locational, occupant demographic, behavioural, and system-level attributes.

The Warm Homes fund has been an important vehicle for social housing retrofit, and laying critical foundations for energy system change – it has also provided the opportunity to demonstrate success and value to the wider sector and to private housing. There are of course challenges to its implementation, which M&E should capture, to reflect back lessons and best practices – and M&E should itself be designed to overcome challenges.

Here, I want to focus on the role of behaviour – in retrofit work, and in M&E design and delivery more generally – and share some of DG Cities’ tips to improve intervention delivery and evaluation in this space.

Behaviour matters

Behavioural attitudes, intentions and changes are critical to decarbonisation at scale. In terms of how aware and informed people and organisations are, how able and motivated they are to participate and respond to interventions, and how lived outcomes change. These outcomes often include subjective wellbeing considerations, like financial stress, place and housing satisfaction.

Behavioural attributes should be understood across a household’s whole user journey of retrofit: the design process, engagement and buy-in, work delivery, and post-work use and maintenance. These stages often require significant care and time and/or cost, whilst the decanting of residents for work and the disruption to their daily lives are critical factors to retrofit uptake and effectiveness. Therefore, understanding and shaping interventions through this user journey and project cycle can help to reduce drop-off, delay and disappointment.

Behaviour is only mentioned once in the DESNZ M&E Framework, with just a few mentions of satisfaction (2) and attitudes (2), with no inclusion of the term wellbeing. Our CTD work also found there were limited datasets for considering socio-economic barriers, impacts, distributional aspects beyond household characteristics and income data, and limited evidence on social and behavioural barriers. Nevertheless, our CTD research raised the need to include social, economic and behavioural attributes as they exacerbate the complexity and challenges to retrofit homes. Our interviews and case studies identified many useful examples.

“Many people don’t understand what it means to them, other people understand it as a cost, other people understand it as a comfort, so it needs a very different communication tool that you need to use to understand the urgency to improve their building... to use different tools depending on the group of people that you need to work with.” (Interviewee)

Low willingness to have one’s own home retrofitted needs to be recognised as a barrier, which has wider elements, both intrinsic (attitudes, knowledge, ability, disruption concern) and extrinsic (incentives, benefits framing) motivation. Ability, or perceived ability, matters too. Vulnerable households, those with health-related issues or potential push-back may or may not be initially known, but they can be identified (other services may know these householders better), empathised with (is home safe, familiar, under their control?), and planned with (why those times or that approach may not work with your family).

Councils can spend a great deal of time and money trying to reach, engage, inform, engage again, and understand a wide range of residents on decarbonisation, and there is a risk that some of these efforts don’t keep households in the programme or provide valuable final outcomes. This has ramifications for further council decarbonisation and place-based ambitions for that neighbourhood. It also matters in understanding and delivering a just transition, with any households being left behind.

Further, there may have been missed opportunities to utilise the retrofit and its engagement to meet other needs of households – opportunities to collaboratively share wider information or invite residents to local health, community or service activities/events - or to support the development of more neighbourhood connection and cohesion – a chance for people to interact positively with their neighbours.

Trying to mitigate risks has been reflected in some of our tips below for enhanced outputs and outcomes. For example, there is quite a gap between the basic M&E KPIs of Number of tenants engaged and signed up to works and Number of properties completed and various risks. These reflect some of what we have learnt through our monitoring and evaluation work.

DG Cities’ top three tips to aid better outcomes through design and delivery:

1. Undertake housing and household information gathering and profiles earlier on, identifying where ability or willingness for programme inclusion may be low and interaction more complex.

   The CTD identification framework can be followed to consider a range of attributes, including physical and behavioural barriers and opportunities, recognising that varying levels of challenges exist across a stock of housing rather than the challenging and non-challenging ones. A range of methods can be used here.

   As well as required in-house surveys, integrating wider service teams’ knowledge and behavioural frameworks like COM-B can be really useful. Build in understanding of resident attitudes, home behaviours and motivations to design and deliver the work, and tailor or disaggregate approaches as needed.

2. Tailor the outreach and engagement design in response to these barriers and enablers.

   A range of routes and methods could be used, considering current communication and community channels, trusted local messengers, and collaborating with more embedded service teams.

3. Design with co-benefits – there may be clear ways for co-benefits to be delivered via the retrofit and energy works, such as street quality, home comfort and others that matter for the specific residents.

   Creating a sense of shared neighbourhood aims and social connection and an individual sense of agency (having areas of choice, even if small, within the programme) have been found to work elsewhere. These may need to be better framed, explored with and presented to residents.

   There may also be an opportunity or need to create a more beneficial offer, raising interest and motivation – could the retrofit journey be combined with other service delivery? Could residents jointly be informed on and access retrofit and other activities? Could the group of residents be brought together earlier, developing a sense of connection and familiarity before the improvement work?

   Here, we have been exploring the concept of local activity matching in neighbourhoods as an efficient delivery model.

Of course, such approaches themselves need to be tested. M&E has a critical role in enabling design and delivery teams to learn what works. There is an important role for pilots here – trying, for example the profiling, tailoring and co-benefits designs above in relation to a wider cohort to assess if they worked better – and, if so, where. Doing so now, and continuing to learn with the monitoring of any different approaches and innovations, can help councils take forward the future scale of retrofit and heating works more efficiently. This is something our DG Cities team love to help with.

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Stay tuned for part two of Leanne’s blog, which looks at how to design an M&E approach in this context, with some useful tips. You can learn more about our evaluation practice, our experts and read our introductory whitepapers here, or get in touch to discuss how this strand of our work can support your decarbonisation and funding aims.

Our tech + behaviour approach to reducing energy use

We have been running a trial in Greenwich to see how a new generation of energy monitors could help council tenants reduce their energy use, and develop greater awareness of their devices and energy consumption in the home. Our Economist, Leanne Kelly is part of the team delivering the project and also volunteered to take part. For our latest piece, she tells us how she’s finding living with the technology…

Now we’re several months into our Smart Energy Device trial, it seems like a good time to reflect on progress and how it’s going against our predictions. Plus, I have been testing the device in my own home as part of our project plan. Has this been helpful in shaping participant engagement – and in better understanding my own energy use habits?

The objective was to install and test the value of smart electricity monitors for residents in council-owned homes. We wanted to see how residents would benefit from greater visibility of their electricity use, coupled with support and advice provided through an online energy community. There are three main elements to the user experience:

• The smart device’s phone app: push notifications raise awareness of usage and encourage participants to test and learn from its different features.

• The Energy Community: a WhatsApp group enables participants to share their experience and ask questions, and allows our team to test nudges and set challenges.

• User surveys: participants provided insights on their current knowledge, views and confidence in energy management, and set broad goals for the trial –  a very useful baseline.

Progress so far

A key area of success has been in highlighting ‘always on’ energy consumption, which, beyond fridge-freezers and critical home equipment, reflects the so-called ‘vampire load’ – the electricity drain from appliances plugged in or on stand-by, but not in use.

This looked to be an easy win for a group of participants with differing levels of app engagement and knowledge. The device’s AI would continue to learn and identify individual appliances, which can make the device even more useful, but the ‘always on’ usage was there to reduce overall energy use. We ensured participants understood what this category was composed of, and encouraged them to walk around their homes to see how their live consumption (in-app) changes as they switch appliances on and off. We then set the group a three-week challenge: can they reduce this? We also used a reference group from the USA (their Always On percentage) and mid-way feedback to activate a sense of competition, social norm and group focus.

““I have been saving energy, it’s amazing. We all take [energy use] for granted until you can see how much you are wasting””

— Resident, trial participant

““Behaviour change - I now ensure that electrical devices are on only when in use. No more on stand-by. Hoping to achieve my monthly target.” ”

— Resident, trial participant

This challenge saw electricity use somewhat decrease for the group overall compared to the weeks prior, with some households showing a much higher reduction. However, it didn’t work for all, and there was less of a reduction in the ‘always on’ shares than we had initially hoped. A lesson is that a nudge like this for a small group of people may reach individuals at different times – some may have other priorities that week, some may be on holiday, others may need a boost to their interest that week. It's clear that the timing of these nudges, and convenience, is key. A ‘Nudge Plus’[1] approach may have been even more useful in engaging individuals at a good time for them, and giving space for them to consider and reflect around such a challenge.

Other information, nudges and challenge campaigns have included:

• App-based nudges: Here, we asked people what their device has found, or what they have found interesting or surprising, focused on specific app features each time, such as ‘How to...’ and ‘Why don’t you try?’

• Advice shares: To support the technology, we provided accompanying energy saving tips for an appliance or behaviour that was raised in the Community Group chat: ‘Did You Know…’

We have found the level of engagement in the Energy Community WhatsApp, four months since inception, pretty encouraging. Analysis shows that participants are opening the app on average twice a week. There has also been a downward trend of electricity consumption per home, which was a key project outcome in the Theory of Change. This will be subject to further analysis for significance and with control variables.

How has my experience with the device compared to the wider trial?

Installation was completed smoothly, in that my electricity use was ready to be viewed immediately. I was opening the app a lot in the first few weeks, exploring what the device was quickly learning itself. This was typically after work (when various appliances might be switched on) and before leaving home to see if any appliances were in stand-by mode. I have had the chance to test how our advice and recommendations could work for the group, for example, what happens and how does it look if we use the ‘live consumption’ feature and turn appliances on? And could we get notifications about weekly goals?

Now, I am motivated to open the app when I receive a notification about a new appliance or one turning on – my app usage has dropped and is now closer to the group’s average. This helped us recognise the value of selecting which notifications are on and when (avoiding information overload and using novelty to promote engagement) and carrying this through into our approach to campaigns and messaging.

Like other participants, I’m really keen to see other complicated appliances identified separately by the device, like washing machines. Particularly in a cost-of-living crisis, there is real value for residents to know what a load of washing consumes and is estimated to cost. I am still checking what might be plugged in – the app is my ‘quick check’, and I’m still keen to see my consumption below the average device user and at the lower end of my own range. In my household’s experience, the app makes that really easy and pretty fun to do this.

Next up, we’re looking forward to having conversations with participants on their own journeys. Alongside the analysis and feedback so far, this will help us tailor approaches to wider roll-out and identify the best ways to support residents, given their current knowledge and tech confidence. So far, we’re seeing some benefits of a combined tech + behaviour approach, giving support and advice to encourage wider energy efficiency literacy, helping people tell their standard kWhs from their vampire load!

If you’d like to know more about how we deliver pilot projects, work with tech companies or local authorities, get in touch.

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[1] Banerjee, S., & John, P. (2021). Nudge plus: Incorporating reflection into behavioural public policy. Behavioural Public Policy, 1-16. doi:10.1017/bpp.2021.6

How do you make change stick? Five points to consider

Although a behaviour change programme can be cost effective for a local authority, that economy is wasted if change doesn’t stick. For one of our final #nudgemonth pieces, Economist, Leanne Kelly sets out the principles for lasting, positive change, from building a programme on a sound conceptual basis, to drawing on established research frameworks and understanding the different stages of the user journey.

At DG Cities, we’re committed to understanding the drivers and enablers that make beneficial behavioural change lasting and sustainable. This means being open to continual learning about what works, when and for whom, and applying an iterative approach. We don’t think about solutions for our towns and cities as one-off interventions, but as ideas that can be refined or adapted in response to how communities and individuals engage with and benefit (or not) from them over time.

We recognise that behaviour change can be challenging, even where people want to make changes. This may be due to existing habits that are easy to continue; in-the-moment barriers, such as timing, immediate alternative gains and required effort; levels of self-efficacy and capability, and of wider contextual and external factors that can influence choice at an individual and social level. We also know that nudges may not always be sufficient in isolation, or appropriate – for example, if they are misaligned to individuals’ preferences, motivations or opportunities. If this is the case, their impact may fade over time due to the novelty effect, or because reliance on attention and incentives may not be sustainable.

Below, we’ve pulled together some of the ways we approach challenges that incorporate behaviour change alongside technology and infrastructure interventions, followed by some salient lessons and themes from the latest academic research.

These are our key lessons for enabling lasting behaviour change:  

1. Articulate a clear ‘theory of change’ early on, and revisit this throughout the project

   A theory of change – a clear, comprehensive description of how and why change is anticipated – is a powerful way of mapping the effect you intend to have on behaviour over time. There can be real value in developing this with appropriate stakeholders, such as client and local authority teams, community group leaders and potential end users. The framework can reflect relationships determined in previous projects, trials and research as a basis. However, it’s important to ensure the specific (and future) context of the project is understood so that the ‘theory of change’ and its relationships remain open to refinement. This also provides a good basis for our team to workshop the context and external influences, along with assumptions, risks and potential mitigations that relate to the project. This theory provides a clear framework we can revisit through a project’s design, delivery, assessment and evaluation.

2. Comprehensive behavioural diagnosis and change drivers

   There are various behavioural science models available to diagnose challenges through a behavioural lens and understand how change might happen. The Behavioural Insight Team’s MINDSPACE and EAST frameworks have been helpful to set out insights and early suggestions across behavioural drivers (messenger, incentives, norms, defaults, salience, priming, attention, commitments and ego – and timing). There are more recent guides, such as the UN’s Behavioural Drivers Model, and various sector and departmental behavioural guides for this stage and onward, and taxonomies of behaviour change interventions and techniques. Our team has used the COM-B model too, as part of the behaviour change wheel, setting out the Capability, Opportunity and Motivation factors for achieving a target behaviour, reflecting the social, psychological and physical and their automatic and reflective elements. This is a really useful accompanying framework to the wheel, with its potential intervention areas, and ensures the factors required for change remain central.

   Engagement is a key part of this stage, to understand how people currently think and feel, where motivations and capability currently lie, and what good change looks like and why. Qualitative analysis can help to draw out common barriers and enablers for the current and future context, and to understand where and why these differ… which leads us well to number 3!

3. Develop bespoke user journeys

   This is something our team really enjoys developing and we find it incredibly useful through a project. Engagement is crucial here for those already on the journey and those who could be users. This also provides a framework for when and how communities could be engaged with a particular intervention – the touchpoints. These might be receiving initial information, registering interest and exploring understanding of delivery stages and how uptake can be supported, as well as feedback with users. Of course, this differs between people, as does the extent to which the different stages matter, points at which drop-off or unintended consequences might occur and how to mitigate them. Applying a ‘systems thinking’ approach can also be useful, to reflect the interdependencies and relationships through this journey.

4. A clear monitoring and evaluation plan, with KPIs

   This is a key part of an iterative approach for learning and refining a project. The more the indicators can be broken down by different groups and stages, and with both objective measures and subjective insights (such as attitudes and experiences), the more useful this can be, whilst recognising limitations, such as reliance on self-reported measures. This is an important part of an evaluation framework, whether a process, impact or value for money approach is taken, for testing the project objectives against successes and areas for improvement.

   Each of these steps can and should be revisited and updated throughout the trial or project to enhance learning and ensure we’re meeting objectives. We revisit users and stakeholders early on, to understand how designs are viewed, how delivery stages are going, and if anything has gone less well or has changed. Sustainable behaviour change necessarily involves a process of revisiting, as environments and behavioural drivers change over time – being open to this and being prepared for how to measure and respond is critical, and here, behavioural research is key.

5. Reflect on the latest academic research

   Our team has been fortunate to attend some excellent workshops, conferences and training in this space, such as the recent International Behavioural Public Policy conference hosted at the London School of Economics. Behavioural science fields are increasingly recognising and responding to the limits and critiques of nudge, and developing behavioural approaches that are more appropriate, alongside nudges for sustainable change. This has also been driven by a growing focus on sustained environmental behaviours, and the critical objectives that such interventions seek to meet, as well as an increasing bank of public policy applications and transparent evaluations. This has been accelerated by recently reported issues in nudge research and questions around how substantially and for how long they shift behaviours.

The above steps are valuable to consider in creating lasting change – in a future piece, we’re going to be looking more closely at some useful insights from academia to help focus interventions and deliver greater impact.

Travel and behaviour change: the journey from intention to action

Future mobility is an important theme of our work at DG Cities, not least for the impact of transport on decarbonisation efforts. For our next #nudgemonth blog, Economist, Leanne Kelly explores some of the conditions that can be conducive to positively changing travel behaviours – from timing and the opportunities around major life events, to the impact of social norms and trials. This aspect of behavioural science is central to our understanding of how people think and feel about travel, and thus how well any solution can meet their needs and perform.

Here at DG Cities, we recognise that the successful planning of future mobility is central to the way a place will function. Mobility matters for decarbonisation, of course, but also for a breadth of socio-economic activities, neighbourhood resilience and vibrancy, and for individual choice and experience. Therefore, we are committed to understanding and incorporating the behavioural dimension – people’s attitudes and feelings about new solutions, their barriers to uptake, and individual-level outcomes, including wellbeing. These are some of the key behavioural principles that we try to keep in mind when it comes to travel and innovations in mobility:

• The role of testing and trialling

• Attitudes and norms are a key part of travel behaviour

• Different outcomes matter to people, at different times – not just journey time

• Travel matters for wellbeing.

Test, trial – and repeat

We believe it is critical to ensure that the widest groups of potential users and non-users are engaged in testing and trialling at every stage, from generating ideas to their design and delivery. Our D-Risk project for self-driving vehicles, for example, found great value in engaging diverse groups in deliberative workshops and surveys. Asking people about their thoughts and feelings – How do you feel about road safety? Which features would you like to see in a self-driving car? Who are autonomous vehicles for, and who should they be for? Who would you trust to operate in the industry? – prompted interesting discussions, which we followed up with ongoing attitude ‘temperature checks’ and produced a bank of ‘edge cases.’

Giving people opportunities to test new technology can stimulate access in a broad sense: by ensuring solutions have been developed with a range of people in mind, that early understanding of how solutions work and could work is distributed more widely. Trialling (and trialling again) matters, as travel, especially regular commuting behaviour, is well-recognised as being habitual and ‘sticky’. Indeed, people are typically more likely to change this behaviour around major life events – moving home, job or family changes.

Research also demonstrates the role of:

• Attitudes

  Pro-environmental attitudes make switches away from car commuting, for example, significantly more likely. Attitudes precede behaviour change and travel perceptions are an important early step in long-term change – though importantly, intentions alone are not enough.

• Norms

  Social norms, that the behaviour is seen from and acceptable to a relevant social group – and personal norms, where an individual sees the behaviour as familiar to them and self-expected in particular situations – matter. The premise is that testing, say, an electric vehicle or a cycle route for oneself and seeing others also test and use it (has your neighbour now gone electric?) will enhance take-up of new solutions. Norms will also have a critical role in shifting attitudes towards mobility as a service and away from ownership models.

• Self-efficacy

  It’s important that we feel we have behavioural control and can make changes to meet our goals, so having a chance to test and trial in a relevant environment is important, beyond hypotheticals.

There have been some excellent trials promoting sustainable travel in new residential developments, from EV car clubs to walking and cycle promotion, reflecting the role of life changes and nudges to create new habits within a conducive spatial context. Some key lessons here are that community-level norms can work well, with concentrated local action being very apparent and social, and that commitments can be supported where a sense of community is evoked and brought into the trial and individual feedback.

The route from attitudes to intentions to behaviour

There are various examples across the sector where testing, attitudes and understanding (or lack of) have mattered, such as cycling uptake and continuation across different groups, the operation of smart motorways, and pedestrianised or low traffic streets. A further, simple mnemonic is that a proposed new option be made per the Behavioural Insights Team’s EAST framework: Easy, Attractive, Social and Timely.

An interesting nuance to the attitudes-behaviour route is that an individual’s different objectives may have quite different impacts when it comes to the actual decisions they make about travel. Timing matters. Sustainable travel demand should increase as more of the public seek improved environmental outcomes. However, this objective can become lost in the travel moment, as a fast or familiar journey is more urgent, tangible and personal. Making the outcomes and objective contributions of travel more salient may be part of informed travel decision-making solutions. Technology can have a role to play – there are examples with sustainable and active travel apps with varied goal-framing (health, environmental, cost savings), and lotteries – people are incentivised to cycle to not miss being in the (small reward) lottery draw. Or sometimes, increasing their shared steps is incentive enough.

But with such examples, supporting harder to reach groups in making the changes that they would like to make, and ensuring changes are maintained beyond the first, novel incentives, is important and challenging… 

Making it easy

Personal behaviour change planning can be helpful. Learning shows that setting short and long-term objectives with people can work well with appropriate messaging, reminders and goal feedback. People may ultimately be supported in choosing, say, the fastest journey now, but the greenest later in the day, such that neither becomes the default and that each trip is understood to be potentially different – by time, weather, co-passenger, mood, and so on. Travel and its planning can be effortful. That’s why ‘making it easy’ is key, where travel defaults and habits only become stronger at the start of a busy day or end of a long day.

Beyond the infrastructure and market delivery, the routes to sustainable and beneficial travel behaviours are of real interest to our work at DG Cities. How people think and feel about travel and different options matters, in terms of how solutions meet needs and will perform. This has been a real focus of some of the projects our team have undertaken in the last two years, such as our EV consumer survey, micro-mobility consumer research and D-Risk programme.

 Travel matters for wellbeing

There is a great bank of research exploring the wellbeing of travel, particularly commuting, which has been described as a stress factor and often an unpleasant part of daily life. It is longitudinal studies that are of real insight here, as they show where there are associations with worse mental health for people with longer commutes, or commutes by certain modes, over periods of time, and associations to lower job and time satisfaction measures, as part of overall life satisfaction.

Travel trips have different interactions with elements of wellbeing – some require more concentration, or are noisier, more or less reliable, or allow for other activities or thinking time, and offer different levels of meaningful choice. There are also the health benefits of active travel. The design of future mobility solutions should learn from the elements and their combinations that most impact people’s different journey experiences – and there are a range of valuable techniques to use here.

The impact of Covid-19 on travel behaviour

Returning to the test and trial principle, the Covid-19 pandemic experience for travel meant that many people were involuntarily or voluntarily adapting and using transport differently. There are important questions here for how the nature of travel has changed in the long-term, and what this means for individuals, subjective wellbeing and urban planning. Our team is interested in the ongoing travel data, and the limited level of modal changes that were made in comparison to travel frequency changes. The wellbeing evidence is emerging and can provide insights from a larger, more varied population that has commuted less – or continues to do so. Whilst some people may now have the autonomy to change their work travel to support their wellbeing, others do not. This has important implications for benefit distribution, and supports the case for considering wellbeing in transport design and investment cases.

Going forward, our team is committed to keeping the role of behavioural insights central: asking people what they think and feel about transport, and if they’d like to test it. We are excited to consider mobility behaviours and how these interact with ensuring places are resilient and full of life. Get in touch if you would like to find out more about this area of our work.

Welcome to Leanne, our new Economist!

As has become tradition when we welcome a new member of the team, we invite them to share a few thoughts on our blog. And we have a new Economist! Over to Leanne Kelly to explain her journey here, her unique mix of socio-economic planning and impact evaluation expertise, and the projects she’s getting started with…

Leanne Kelly, Economist

I’m thrilled to have joined the DG Cities team as an Economist, with a behavioural economics slant, and glad to share a few words about my first few weeks.

Firstly, I am so pleased to say what an incredibly warm, open and ideas-driven team it is. It’s clear that collaboration matters, both internally and externally, as testified by the fantastic range of expert, academic, local government and private sector partnerships that DG Cities has developed. Whilst the term ‘dynamic’ is often used, I can genuinely say I am part of a company where no two people have the same career paths or qualifications, but a shared purpose, care and passion for people and improving places sings across the team.

Joining a new organisation gives you a chance to reflect, and to perhaps find a nice overarching narrative that pieces together what has come before and led you to where you are now. My story weaves together my education in economics and local economic development, my early work experience shadowing town centre managers in South West London, and a very enjoyable ten years in infrastructure consultancies, working on a range of multi-disciplinary projects, from needs assessment and business cases for places across the UK to urban economic plans with towns in Kenya. And finally, my part-time return to education to complete a behavioural economics MSc, which was incredibly rewarding.

The headline for me is that I have been so fortunate in my experiences so far, for all I have learnt along the way, and for some brilliant mentors and colleagues. Experiences that I hope help me to consider challenges and solutions for DG Cities’ projects in the broadest sense. Questions like, what makes a place work well for people, and where and why does this differ? What will improve people’s journeys to work, and does this differ for their leisure time? How can we better understand barriers in the uptake of home-based technologies? And, what might be the unintended consequences of accelerating a particular city trend?

“I’m excited to be bringing a quantitative focus to the team. It will help us better understand the challenges of urban innovation, the potential effects of any intervention and, vitally, allow us to openly evaluate impacts – including those that were unexpected. This insight will enable us to explore, in even greater depth, what works, why and where.”

— Leanne Kelly

At DG Cities, I’m excited to bring my experience in socio-economic planning, impact assessment, project appraisal and evaluation to our projects. My work involves drawing together local data and insights to design effective approaches, and to ensure that the impact of interventions can be monitored and refined with a greater openness. I’m keen to draw in the important developments in infrastructure, place and wellbeing evidence and measurement, to help appropriately incorporate behavioural insights, and inform on the socio-economic drivers, uncertainties, inequalities and effects that matter. To bring this knowledge framework to every project, whether we’re talking electric vehicles, digital use cases, high streets or micro-mobility.

In each of my first weeks, I have been fortunate to attend exciting workshops and events where I have met talented and generous folk – and inevitably, made a library of notes! I attended a Wellbeing Valuation workshop led by the What Works Centre, which was framed by both the Green Book – Treasury guidance for officials and analysts who work on business cases and appraisals – and excellent real-world examples. As well as building confidence in robustly considering wellbeing, it brought into focus work from my Masters, where my dissertation looked at travel to work changes through Covid-19 and subjective wellbeing.

I joined DG Cities’ D-Risk deliberative workshop at Imperial College, where members of the public shared their views and ideas for self-driving vehicle safety. It was fascinating to capture participants’ opinion journeys and to hear their stories and hypotheticals. Week three saw me attend the Behavioural Public Policy annual conference hosted by the LSE, with discussions drawing out the future of nudge and inspiring talks on behavioural environmental economics. This emphasised some really useful points for DG Cities’ own projects, including supportive interventions for household energy consumption, and led to fascinating chats with ‘vegan as the default’ snacks in the London sunshine afterwards. And finally, last week, I was at the Smart Mobility Living Lab in Stratford, discussing safety, capacity, sustainability and cost in balancing mobility, where user perceptions and inclusion were central. DG Cities helped to found and has been part of the SMLL community for a number of years, and I was grateful to have had the chance to see what it’s all about.

Joining one of the D-Risk deliberative workshops discussing autonomous vehicle safety

Looking ahead for my role here, I’ve been reflecting on the intersecting challenges ahead. I’m proud to be part of a team with such a strong legacy of understanding where communities and individuals are on emerging issues, and prioritising their needs, views and agency in change-making.

We are working on purposeful projects, which can make a difference to people’s qualify of life and their environments. For example, we are looking at what helps a neighbourhood to thrive and how we can use data from the ground to build interventions with residents. We are looking at the critical energy nexus of consumption-cost-sustainability, both at the hyper-local level to support residents, and with partners to test the feasibility of heat pump deployment. Plus, we are continuing to ask our research community about these pressing issues and future trends, which will certainly be a discussion for a future blog. I am excited about this next chapter and our projects, and look forward to making new connections and sharing more on these topics.