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The role that social class plays within the desistance journeys of individuals on probation is largely unexplored. This lack of understanding is acknowledged as a limitation within theorising around desistance processes. It also prompts questions as to the awareness of class and classism issues amongst probation staff and their practice approaches within this difficult area of professional application. This reflective paper offers some discussion areas in which probation staff can collectively consider their experiences within this field, as well as those under their supervision. It is suggested that this topic requires greater attention amongst all involved in providing probation services.

Probation staff supervision is an established professional practice tool, documented historically through the lens of the Probation Journal. This article charts Journal discussions surrounding staff supervision and places them alongside a recent research study examining current practice. Study findings indicate that staff value dedicated time and space for structured supervision that contains significant elements of a more clinical approach. Nevertheless, supervision functions within congested spaces in which managerial aspects of staff engagement encroach. Finding an accommodation between differing approaches appears challenging. More broadly, competing views resound within a landscape of looming professional registration and associated requirements of continuous professional development.

One aim of zero carbon, or zero energy, buildings is to help slow climate change. However, regulatory definitions frequently miss substantial emissions, for example ones associated with the materials the building is constructed from, thereby compromising this goal. Unfortunately, including such emissions might restrict the design space, reduce architectural freedom or greatly increase costs. This work presents a new framework for examining the problem. The zero carbon/energy design and regulatory space forms a sub-space of the hyper-volume enclosing all possible designs and regulatory frameworks. A new mathematical/software environment was developed which allows the size and shape of this sub-space to be investigated for the first time. Twenty-four million building design/regulatory standard combinations were modelled and assessed using a tree classification approach. It was found that a worldwide zero standard that includes embodied emissions is possible and is easier to achieve if a carbon rather than an energy metric is adopted, with the design space twice the size for a carbon metric. This result is important for the development of more encompassing regulations, and the novel methods developed applicable to other aspects of construction controlled by regulation where there is the desire to examine the impact of new regulations prior to legislation.

AbstractThere are currently millions of displaced people encamped in low-quality shelters that jeopardise the health of these displaced populations. These shelters, which exhibit poor thermal regulation and air quality, are often inhabited by households for several years. Recently, the internal environment of shelters has been recognised as a determinant of the health of the occupants and the indoor air quality (IAQ) and internal temperatures have been identified as critical factors affecting occupants' health. Attempts by researchers and private companies to develop healthier shelter solutions have mainly prioritised factors such as rapid deployment, transportability and sustainability. Via a systematic bibliometric analysis of the existing literature, this review examines the impact of shelters' internal environment on occupant health. Self-reports and building simulation are the most common methodologies reported in the literature, but there is a disconnect between the reported shelter issues and their impact on health. This is likely due to the multifaceted and site-specific factors analysed. Indoor air quality, thermal comfort and overcrowding are the most commonly identified shelter issues, which are strongly related to the presence of infectious and airborne diseases. An analysis of the available literature indicates that there is still a lack of clear guidance linking shelter quality to health. Moreover, evidence of the impact of shelters on health is harder to find, and there is a gap regarding the metrics and the methodology used to evaluate shelter quality. Therefore, further research is necessary to provide evidence of the impact of shelter design on health through transdisciplinary approaches.

This article is about the experience of telephone supervision from the perspective of practitioners. It is set in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, which changed and challenged the nature of probation supervision and required service users and supervisors to communicate remotely, using the telephone, rather than by meeting face-to-face. The article explores some of the impacts and consequences of telephone contact and examines the extent to which this approach has a part to play in future, post-pandemic, ways of working. The article draws on findings from a research project examining remote supervision practice during the pandemic. Fieldwork (comprising an online survey and a series of semi-structured interviews) was conducted between July and September 2020 in three divisions within an English community rehabilitation company. The article reinforces the importance of face-to-face work in probation practice but suggests that there is scope to retain some use of telephone supervision as part of a future blended practice model. Further thinking about telephone supervision might consider these three themes identified in the research: remote working limits the sensory dimension of supervision, relationships remain at the heart of practice, and good practice requires professional discretion.

Improving the energy efficiency of buildings is a key climate change mitigation strategy. The application of which will require substantial improvements in the pre-existing stock; a subset of which are buildings of historic importance. Retrofitting such buildings is controversial, as historic elements might be altered or covered up, thereby changing the character of the building. In this work, we introduce a novel socio-mathematical method to aid the resolution of this controversy. Firstly, we garner in a new way the views of 116 members of the public about the acceptability of 15 common retrofit measures. Secondly, the public's ranking of the acceptability of the measures with respect to heritage impact is compared to a ranking of the energy saving given by the measures when analysed using a dynamic thermal simulation of the building. No simple correlation is found; hence it is concluded that measures that present greater energy savings are not de facto more intrusive, and that there is the potential for a constructive dialogue between those inspired by a conservation agenda and those targeting carbon savings. Finally, by using a Pareto front approach, a new theory is developed of how to identify measures that are sensible in the eyes of both parties. This new three-stage process will be of use to those in Government attempting to resolve such conflicts or set national guidance.

Heat waves give rise to order of magnitude higher mortality rates than other weather-related natural disasters. Unfortunately both the severity and amplitude of heat waves are predicted to increase worldwide as a consequence of climate change. Hence, meteorological services have a growing need to identify such periods in order to set alerts, whilst researchers and industry need representative future heat waves to study risk. This paper introduces a new location-specific mortality risk focused definition of heat waves and a new mathematical framework for the creation of time series that represents them. It focuses on identifying periods when temperatures are high during the day and night, as this coincidence is strongly linked to mortality. The approach is tested using observed data from Brazil and the UK. Comparisons with previous methods demonstrate that this new approach represents a major advance that can be adopted worldwide by governments, researchers and industry.

In most industrialized countries, the buildings sector is the largest contributor to energy consumption and associated carbon emissions. These emissions can be reduced by a combination of energy efficiency and the use of building integrated renewables. Additionally, either singularly or as a group, buildings can provide energy network services by timing their use and production of energy. Such grid-aware or grid-responsive buildings have been termed Active Buildings. The recent UK Government investment of £36m in the Active Building Centre is a demonstration that such buildings are of considerable interest. One problem with the concept, however, is that there is no clear definition of Active Buildings, nor a building code to design or research against. Here we develop and test an initial novel code, called ABCode1. It is based on the need to encourage: (i) the minimisation of energy consumption; (ii) building-integrated generation; (iii) the provision of grid services; and (iv) the minimisation of embodied carbon. For grid services, we find that a lack of a precise, quantifiable measure, or definition, of such services means that for the time being, theoretical hours of autonomy of the building is the most reasonable proxy for these services within such a code.

AbstractThe expanding use of IT has brought an increase in productivity to the world of business, industry and commerce. However, this is not mirrored by an equivalent growth in the use of IT by aid agencies in post-disaster situations. We report a pioneering two-stage study which tested the appetite for the increased use of computational IT tools in this sector, assessed their level of usefulness and whether they can be practically implemented. Thirty aid workers across nineteen countries were surveyed on their use of IT and computational tools in shelter design and provision. The key finding was that none of the participants used any building simulation tools or software packages in any of the design stages of shelter construction. Using this result, two example tools were created—one assessing daylighting and the other environmental impact. A second survey involving 48 aid workers was then carried out to record their experience of using the new tools and 97% of the participants identified a need for such shelter design tools. The majority felt that the new tools were useful and that they would like to use similar tools in their work, most of them preferring tools in the form of web applications. It is concluded that humanitarian workers in the shelter sector are very willing to adopt IT-based computational tools in their work and would appreciate doing so, but only if they have access to suitably simple tools which are quick to use and easy to learn.

Both the Paris heat wave of 2003 and recent high-resolution climate change predictions indicate a world where mortality from extreme weather events will increase. Most heat wave deaths occur in buildings, and are driven by the thermal characteristics of the buildings and their local environment. Unfortunately previous work on the topic has ignored such spatial variations by either assuming the climate has little variation over a large area, or using archetypes of buildings from stock models. The latter forgetting that neither building characteristics nor landscape context are uniform over a city, with for example suburbs having a different architecture and shading to the inner city. In this work we use a statistical method combined with a new remote surveying tool to assemble accurate models of real buildings across a landscape then map the spatial variability in overheating and excess deaths now and in the future at a resolution of 5km x 5km. High spatial variation in the risk of overheating and heat-related mortality was found due to the variability of architecture, context and weather. Variability from the architecture and shading context were found to be a greater influence on the spatial variation in overheating than climate variability. Overheating risk was found to increase significantly with heat-related mortality tripling by the 2050s. The method was validated against data collected during the northern hemisphere 2006 hot summer. The maps produced would be a highly useful resource for government in identifying populations of greatest concern when developing policies to combat such deaths.