Professor Peter E Lloyd

Peter Lloyd is a retired Academic and Policy Consultant still active in research and writing with a continuing role as a Public Advisor in health and social care research. 

Personal Profile 

Peter is a highly experienced and much travelled senior academic, consultant  and writer. After four decades spent in academia, he moved on to a second career in policy consultancy. He was appointed as a Technical Director in Ecorys - a Rotterdam-based international public policy consultancy. Having eventually had to leave full-time work to provide dementia care for his wife, he continued to write and publish on his personal website (and still does). In 2019, Peter became actively involved in health and social care reseach as a Public Advisor with ARC NWC - a consortium of regional research universities supported by the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR). This emerged out of Peter's experience as a carer for his wife Ros (who died in 2023). The PA work carries on across a wide variety of projects - combining the experience of a long academic research career with the challenging lived experience of a carer in today's health and socail care environment.

Academic Career

As an academic at the Universities of Queensland, Manchester, Queens (Ontario) and Liverpool, Peter covered a full spectrum of HE teaching and adminstrative roles.  He left Higher Education in 2001 as Professor of Urban Geography, Head of the Department of Geography and Dean of the Faculty of Social and Environmental Studies at the University of Liverpool.

In parallel with his teaching and administration, Peter ran series of highly regarded academic research units - NWIRU, CURID and CRED - working on local and regional development with an emphasis on policy evaluation.  He had a major role in the inception and development of the Merseyside Objective One Programme. For over 20 years Peter supplied academic expertise to the European Commission and to the OECD. He reprised this role 2017-2020 advising on the Digital Systems Governance (EU -JRC) and on Future Work and Local Skills Policy (OECD – LEED).

Written output over 40 years as a full-time academic career included Location in Space and Modern Western Society (co-authored with Peter Dicken) and over 100 journal papers.  Academic interests shifted over time but were always in the broad fields of local economic development, the social economy and local skills policies.  It is a great privilege that a number of former Doctoral students and Research Assistants from the research units have become world leaders in their field.

Consultancy Career

The second career that began in 2001 saw Peter move from Liverpool University to Enterprise PLC (formerly Lancashire Enterprises Ltd) in Preston.  Later he started his own (still active) private consultancy business - Peter Lloyd Associates - before being head-hunted by Ecotec (later to become part of the Dutch-based international consultancy Ecorys) as a Technical Director with prime responsibility for European Commission work (DG REGIO; DG EMPL and DG EAC). 

Peter went on to establish the UK company’s European Policy Division and was its first Director from 2005-2008. He also had a special role as a coach on company strategy-making. The Commission work focused on local employment, young entrepreneurs, higher education and skills policy. This came to an end in 2011 with his wife’s illness and a role as a full-time home carer.

Roles in Retirement

While acting as a carer, local roles were taken up as a Governor at Blackpool and the Fylde College and at a local Primary School. Taking up a part-time research and writing role again, Peter was able to restore the link with OECD-LEED on designing local skills strategies and until 2020 acted as an advisor on ‘The Digital Transformation - Governance of Human Societies (Digitranscope)’ programme within the  EU Joint Research Centre for Advanced Studies. 

Peter's primary role at present is as a Public Advisor in health inequalities and health data research for the ARC NWC programme funded by NIHR and managed from Liverpool University. This links academic experts to health professionals on the ground in local settings across Cumbria, Lancashire and Merseyside to assist in the co-production of practical outcomes. Its unique feature is that this is done in combination with the active involvement and engagement of patients and the public. 

During the COVID-19 lockdown, along with Michael Blakemore, Peter produced eight papers.They follow the progression of pandemic events from April to December 2020. The papers were consolidated together in a book - "The Covid-19 Experience in England: Eight Essays on the Pandemic and its Management". Subsequent papers on health and social care, people and places and political economy are listed and available on this website under Papers and Blogs.