Insecure lives and the policy disconnect

Project description

Millions of UK residents are worrying about multiple issues such as money, housing, health and caring responsibilities. Individual insecurities may build up and combine. Perceived insecurities may have different psychological and behavioural effects to other disadvantages. They may prevent households using their opportunities, including the primary education, adult skills training and work opportunities which policy aims to provide. They may harm well-being, keep people out of the workforce, and limit productivity. As a result, some people may not be able to benefit from polices to support disadvantaged areas, and in turn, these policies may not be able to achieve their full potential.

Many past local growth and regeneration projects have been very successful, but many have not met all their goals. Progress has been more difficult for some so-called 'left behind' areas and so-called 'hard to reach' groups of people. Multiple insecurities may provide a partial explanation, and we know that some key individual insecurities have grown in prevalence over time.

A team of researchers from multiple disciplines have been awarded funding by the ESRC to research this issue. The team includes Abigail McKnight, Laura Lane, and Irene Bucelli from CASE. Jonathan Webb, Sally Pearce and Helen Lomax from Sheffield Hallam University, Irena Grugulis from the University of Leeds, Anita Mangan from the University of Bristol, Stuart Henderson from Ulster University, and Jonathan Payne from De Montfort University, and freelance artist Laura Sorvala.

Our two main research questions are:

1. How do people's experiences of multiple insecurities in a place impact their wellbeing and their ability to participate in and benefit from opportunities that will help them and which will reduce regional inequalities?
2. How can policies and policymakers reduce insecurities and join up better to improve well-being, increase opportunity and reduce regional inequalities?

We want to know how many people experience multiple insecurities, in what combinations, where are they, and what are the implications for those who experience them? What are the lived and felt experiences of multiple insecurities? What policies and stakeholders are implicated in these risks, and what can they do together to de-risk lives and increase opportunity?

We will focus on certain key insecurities - food insecurity, income fluctuations, insecure work, the threat of eviction or loss of housing, and problems with health and caring responsibilities. We will also focus on important outcomes - performance at primary school, skills, employment and wellbeing.

We will explore multiple insecurities using mixed methods:

• Discussion with policymakers about multiple insecurities, and what they know and want to learn about them.
• Evidence reviews of multiple insecurities, their prevalence and impacts, and of promising approaches in addressing multiple insecurities.
• Quantitative analysis on the same topics across the UK, using Understanding Society supplemented by other sources.
• Discussions with 24-30 people experiencing multiple insecurities in three diverse areas in England. These will covert their lived experiences of insecurities, the effects, and who might be able to mitigate them. We will use an artist drawing alongside to record responses and to elicit new insights, and other visual and story methods.
• Discussion with policymakers and people identified as potential 'risk influencers' on what they could do to 'derisk' people's lives, based on personas created from case study stories.

We hope to develop and evidence 'multiple insecurity' as a useful new interdisciplinary concept. We have built dissemination to some policymakers into the project. We will also produce a final report and policy briefs; mapping, and other visual and story information; and material for deposit with UK Data Archive.