Authors:
Julie MacLeavy, Professor of Economic Geography, University of Bristol
David Manley, Professor of Human Geography, University of Bristol
Jamie Evans, Senior Research Associate, University of Bristol; and
Katie Cross, Senior Research Associate, University of Bristol

COVID brought rapid and lasting economic change around the world. But in the UK, the level of impact depended on where you lived when the virus arrived.

Our research shows that the economic difficulties experienced during periods of social restrictions were particularly stark for those in deprived neighbourhoods.

During the first national lockdown, for example, we found that 23% of people in the most deprived parts of the UK were unable to afford day-to-day expenses or to save for the future. Food bank usage was reported at 9%. In the least deprived places, those figures were 6% and 0.5% respectively.

The impact on employment followed a similar pattern, with 10% of workers from the most deprived areas experiencing a job loss in the early months of the pandemic, compared with only 4% in the least deprived areas. Overall, the people who live in the UK’s most deprived neighbourhoods fell further behind through the pandemic.

This corresponds with previous data that lays bare how being poor limits a person’s ability to cope with – and recover from – abrupt changes in economic conditions. Mostly, this stems from a lack of capacity to soak up financial shocks (having savings, for example) and from the nature of state welfare provision.

With COVID, the sudden restrictions placed on the labour market, alongside an absence of childcare, placed many in uncharted waters. Among them, single-parent households were much more likely to have experienced job loss or a reduction in working hours.

A report by the independent Women’s Budget Group found that the socio-economic effects of COVID were particularly severe for women with disabilities, women from minority ethnic groups, and women of migrant status. Again, this underlines how the pandemic exposed and amplified existing vulnerabilities.

In terms of emergency support, the temporary universal credit increase (which provided an additional £20 a week to the standard allowance) helped to reduce overall inequality. And the furlough scheme (plus similar support for the self-employed) reached many in potential difficulty – but not all.

Brought in to prevent potential mass unemployment and pay workers a replacement wage, these policies excluded many in the most precarious positions, including an estimated three million on zero-hour contracts, agency workers and the newly self-employed.

But those eligible for employment support were not immune from difficulty. About one-third of the 11.2 million workers furloughed saw their income fall below the official low-pay threshold. A further 6% ended up behind with their bills as a result of large income falls, high expenses and low savings.

Filling the gaps in state support were family, friends and community groups, many of which were set up in direct response to the pandemic. Informal transfers of money from these sources were common for those on the lowest incomes, regardless of where they lived.

Continued risk

This highlights a failure of state support to fully mitigate the effects of COVID restrictions for those facing financial, food and housing insecurity. Despite the government spending over £70 billion on emergency financial assistance, a combination of insufficient payments and problems of access left many reliant on informal forms of support. In addition, there is evidence that the stigma surrounding benefits put a lot of people off applying for help, even when they really needed it.

Our analysis found that working-age adults were more likely to have received financial support from family or friends (8%) than apply for universal credit (4%). We also found that this kind of reliance was more likely among those who had been furloughed than those who had continued working through the pandemic, and even more widespread for those who had lost their job, suggesting that the furlough scheme, while not perfect, was better than mass job losses.

Today, while the worst effects of COVID seem to be behind us, the risks of job losses, business failures and debt defaults remain. In the UK, recession is expected, inflation is high, and energy bills are soaring. Of particular concern are those for whom the pandemic has increased their financial vulnerability. They are not well placed to weather this coming crisis.

Rather than scale back state financial support, the government needs to ensure the poorest and most vulnerable are protected. In doing so, they would guard against the scarring effects of unemployment and debt.

There is also a role for targeted regional investment. The financial impacts of the pandemic were most keenly experienced by those in places with long histories of deeply entrenched disadvantage. Without help, the hardship and insecurity wrought by the pandemic risks becoming ingrained, and with it, the geographical concentration of poverty that our analysis has uncovered.

Julie MacLeavy, Professor of Economic Geography, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol
David Manley, Professor of Human Geography, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol
Jamie Evans, Senior Research Associate, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol; and
Katie Cross, Senior Research Associate, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

By Cynthia L. Fonta, Final year Doctorate candidate, School for Policy Studies

Volunteering and outreach activities

I volunteered in a research institution in a community in Burkina Faso prior to joining the School for Policy Studies as a postgraduate research student. It was a lonely four hours’ drive to that community from the city. The roads were terribly dusty during the dry season and flooded in the wet seasons. We had to pass several flooded bridges in the wet season – a risky crossing. Just getting there was a nightmare but then, you tend to forget all agitations and worries once you have arrived. It was a natural and untouched environment with clean air and wonderful people. I fell in love with the villagers with their friendly and generous nature.

What struck me the most was how forgotten they were by the development plans and projects. I could see in their eyes the unspoken truth of suffering and poverty. Water was not clean; sanitation was in the bushes and no households who could afford even unimproved pit toilets.  I thought to myself, how can something as basic as this be a luxury? How can there be campaigns to increase Vitamin A uptake, mass deworming programs, hand washing sensitisation campaigns without the most basic key to life, clean water services? These are all good strategies, but in my opinion, they must be integrated with the most important needs of the community.

I suddenly had the urge and motivation to go back to school to enhance my research skills and influence policy. I had no financial means to help, I had no voice to speak and the only way I could have a voice was through research. So, my journey to Bristol began. I met my current supervisor, Professor Gordon, whose work had so much inspired me to understand child poverty and how it was measured. The rest was history. The very idea that I realised my dreams to study policy in health-related research is itself a blessing I never take for granted. My stipends from the University of Bristol studentship helped me adjust to student life and take care of my cost-of living expenses. A small part of it was saved every month because I promised myself to do something someday to help an impoverished community.

          

I went back home for the summer break to be with my kids while working remotely from home, Yaounde, Cameroon. It was my first time living in that community in Yaounde. Early on, I noticed children walking down the hill with buckets to fetch water. Their ages ranged from as small as four years to adults.  I decided to drill a bore hole for the community with some funds put aside from my stipend. Notice the little boy fetching water into the container for drinking in the photo on the right-hand side above? The water has been tested and it is odourless, colourless, free of chemicals and microbes. I thank the University of Bristol and the Bristol Poverty Institute for granting such an opportunity to make a difference in this small way.

I also had the opportunity to meet a lovely group of persons with special needs at the Centre des Handicapés (special needs centre) at Etoug-Ebe in Yaounde Cameroon during same period. This meeting took place during a three-day symposium organised by the deputy director of the Centre (centred with the white face cap in the photo below), Mr Douglas Achingale. I was invited by one of the guest speakers.

The participants came from all provinces across the country to discuss their challenges and difficulties of navigating their limitations in such resource poor settings. They were educated about their rights as included in the United Nations Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN CRPD), followed by a series of entertainment activities.

The director owns an NGO Sports on Wheels Association whose main purpose is to promote sporting activities among people with special needs. They are known throughout the country for organising country wide basketball tournaments, table tennis tournaments, weightlifting and other indoor activities for persons with special needs to uplift their spirits and keep them healthy. It was really impressive.

My research and future interests

My research focuses on child poverty and deprivation in decent living standard (clean water, adequate sanitation, access to health and adequate diet, quality housing, access to education and information) across African states and the implications of poverty on child mental health states. Child poverty is examined in the context of postcolonial economic and administrative dependency structures linked to persistent unequal distribution of poverty and under-development in the continent. African states are categorised into two groups, Anglophone Africa, governed under indirect ruling structures set up by English colonists, and Francophone African states which ruled under centralised or direct ruling polices set up by French colonists. The overall aim of the study is to determine which group produced worse child poverty outcomes and inequality distribution to direct policy priorities. Here, large secondary data from varied sources are harmonized over different survey years to produce robust poverty and inequality estimates.

The School for Policy Studies and my supervisors, Professor David Gordon and Dr Zoi Toumpakari, have guided my epistemic way of thinking to critically theorise, conceptualise and hypothesise innovations and ideas to provide the best evidence for policy. They exposed me to managing large data sets, multidimensional poverty estimations, inequality calculations and multilevel regression analysis. I intend to carry on with these skills by conducting research in vulnerable groups anywhere in the world. I have done some work on elderly wellbeing, currently doing some work on children in poverty and hopefully in the future, work with persons with special needs or maternal wellbeing. I intend to use these skills to shine a light on impoverished and vulnerable groups in the society through community research and implementation activities.

Advice to policy students

My advice to policy students is to follow their passion, be innovative in thinking and remain in constant touch with supervisors who will guide and harness your thoughts, innovations, and productivity. Present your work in conferences and research groups to gain feedback for improvements. Volunteer as much in research institutions or programs because it opens one’s mind to relevant problems and areas on which to focus. Take advantage of every conference or program you attend to grow your research network and request to volunteer in any program that might be of your interest. Your supervisors are your guide to this lonely and challenging path to obtaining a PhD. It gets challenging as the workload increases over the years, but it takes dedication, commitment and focus to keep going, following the directions of your supervisors every step of the way.

Volunteering and outreach institutional contacts

Institut de Recherche en Sciences de la Santé, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.
Contact- Jean-Noël Poda (podajnl@yahoo.fr)

Centre National de Réhabilitation des Personnes Handicapées, Yaoundé, Cameroon
Contact- Mr Douglas Achingale (havocslord@yahoo.co.uk)

By Dr Beth Stone

Autism is disproportionately over-represented in homeless populations. However, little is known about how autistic people experience homelessness and how best to support them.

My research examined the factors which increase risk of homelessness for autistic people, autistic people’s experiences of homelessness, and barriers to service engagement. The research found that autistic people are at increased risk of homelessness due to the social and economic disadvantages they face throughout their lives such as low educational attainment, difficulties finding and maintaining employment, and social exclusion. Once homeless, support services were often inaccessible or unsuitable. The impact of autism on day-to-day life was not recognised by housing offices. If participants were found eligible for support they were housed in over-crowded and confrontational hostels which aggravated social anxiety and sensory processing difficulties.

Improving services

Working with two local organisations, Bristol Autism Spectrum Service (BASS) and Golden Key, we created an autism and homelessness working group, with the aim of improving local services for autistic people experiencing homelessness.

I also received an ESRC Impact Acceleration Grant to produce a film based on the lived experience of my research participants.

In July, we hosted an event for local stakeholders from homelessness and health services and Bristol City Council.

The event featured:

• The launch of the film highlighting the experiences of autistic people who have experienced homelessness in the South West of England, followed by a presentation on how autistic people may experience homelessness more generally and barriers to service use (Dr Beth Stone).
• Presentation of the Autism and Homelessness Toolkit, aimed at improving access to, and engagement with, homelessness services for autistic people (Dr Alasdair Churchard).
• Autism awareness training provided by Bristol Autism Spectrum Service (BASS).

Discussion in feedback groups indicated ways in which support services planned to adopt autism friendly ways of working into their everyday practice.

View the film launched at the event here.

Next steps

We are putting together a proposal aimed at improving local service provision for autistic people who are experiencing homelessness.

Feedback from discussion groups at the awareness event has helped to shape our proposal, which we will discuss with autistic people with lived experience of homelessness. We will then use the proposal to advocate for wider changes to policy and support services.

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Related publications:

Stone, Beth. 2022. “Homelessness as a Product of Social Exclusion: Reinterpreting Autistic Adults’ Narratives through the Lens of Critical Disability Studies.” Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research 24(1), 181–195. DOI: https://www.sjdr.se/articles/10.16993/sjdr.881/

Stone, B., Cameron, A., Dowling, S. 2022. “The autistic experience of homelessness: Implications from a narrative enquiry”. Autism (1-11), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613221105091

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This blog post is also available on the School for Policy Studies’ blog.

Authors:
Sharon Collard, Professor of Personal Finance, University of Bristol
Jamie Evans, Senior Research Associate, Personal Finance Research Centre, University of Bristol

Even before the current cost of living crisis, disabled people were much more likely than non-disabled people to be in poverty and living on inadequate incomes. Now, spiralling living costs are adding to years of financial disadvantage. Our new analysis of YouGov survey data starkly illustrates the situation, showing that three in ten disabled households are in serious financial difficulty.

The UK government has announced several measures that will provide some relief for many, including an energy price freeze and payments totalling £650 for people on means-tested benefits. All households will also receive a £400 reduction in energy bills via instalments spread over six months, and 8 million pensioner households are receiving a separate one-off payment of £300.

Disabled people who receive benefits that aren’t based on income (non-means-tested) will also get a one-off cost of living payment of £150. But while these measures are welcome, this amount is a fraction compared to the additional costs disabled people typically have to cover.

Disabled households often need to spend more on essentials like heating and insurance, as well as necessary equipment, therapies and support. In 2019, disability charity Scope estimated that disabled people in the UK face extra costs of £583 per month, on average. For one fifth of disabled people, this “disability price tag” was over £1,000.

Source: Pixabay

Rising energy costs are particularly impacting households that need to run vital equipment. Wheelchairs, feeding and suction pumps, or ceiling hoists all need to be constantly charged. Some people may also need additional heating to stay warm to prevent pain or seizures.

Considering these already higher costs, it should not come as a surprise that disabled households are disproportionately cutting back or doing without compared with other households. We found that four in ten have cut back on overall spending in 2022, and half have already struggled to keep their home warm this year. Similar proportions have reported reducing their use of the cooker and shower.

Around one in ten non-disabled households report that rising costs mean they are eating fewer meals. This rises to three in ten among disabled households. A survey conducted by the charity Family Fund found that half of carers looking after disabled children have skipped meals in the last year. We increasingly hear about “choosing between heating and eating”, but there are concerning reports of some being forced to choose between heating and medication.

Many disabled households are already at a breaking point, even before we enter a more costly winter. There is nothing else these families can cut back on. The situation is so dire for some that for the first time in its history, the deaf-blind and complex impairments charity Sense is giving cost of living grants of £500 directly to families.

When work and benefits aren’t enough

Soaring inflation means that disabled people in employment are experiencing the same real terms fall in wages as the rest of the working-age population. Around half of working-age disabled people are in work, but many others are excluded from participating in the labour market.

There is a large gap between the rate of disabled and non-disabled people in employment, for many reasons including structural and discriminatory barriers. Disabled people are also underemployed due to the quality of jobs on offer to them, forced to take lower-skilled or lower-paid roles offering fewer or infrequent hours.

Across all UK households in serious financial difficulty, disabled households are much more likely to have no earners than their non-disabled counterparts. But with a quarter of disabled households who have two full-time workers currently in serious financial difficulty, work is by no means a guarantee of avoiding hardship. In-work poverty disproportionately affects disabled people.

Disabled people are more likely to engage with the social security system. This is partly due to their lower employment rate, but also because there are benefits available to assist with the higher cost of living with a disability. State benefits for disabled people rose by 3.1% in April.

But, as is the case with earned income, rising inflation means that benefits are shrinking in real terms. For disabled households, this means substantial monthly financial losses.

Families with a disabled adult were among the hardest hit groups from changes to the social security system in the 2010s, with the inadequacy of provision for disabled people attracting widespread criticism. The process of applying for disability benefits has been described by disability campaigners and charities as complicated and inhumane.

For lower-income disabled households, these new cost of living payments will be insufficient or at best, a short-term solution to longstanding financial inequalities. These disadvantages are more widely corrosive, driving social exclusion, limiting agency and choice, and ultimately impacting people’s mental health and wellbeing.

To meet the scale of the crisis faced by disabled households, longer-term solutions – such as proposals for a decent social security system – are certainly needed if we are to avoid a further decline in living standards.

Sharon Collard, Professor of Personal Finance, University of Bristol and Jamie Evans, Senior Research Associate, Personal Finance Research Centre, University of Bristol.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. It was also previously re-blogged by PolicyBristol Hub.

Author: Sara Davies, Senior Research Fellow, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol

As the UK faces the sharpest increase in the cost of living in a generation, households across the country are feeling the pinch. Those already on low incomes are affected most, not just because they have less money to begin with, but also because they actually pay more to access essential goods and services than anyone else.

Known as the “poverty premium”, it is essentially an extra cost of being poor. Much of this premium is driven by systems which effectively penalise low-income households for not being able to afford more economical ways of paying for everyday necessities.

I recently led a University of Bristol investigation, funded by the charity Fair by Design, which revealed that where people live has a significant effect on the extent of the premiums they incur. In the poorest areas of the UK, families pay up to £541 a year more than affluent families to access the same basic essentials.

Here are four things that can cost more if you’re already poor:

1. Spreading costs

Some household costs come with a choice of paying the full amount up front, or spreading the total over the course of a year. This can apply to anything from insurance to a mobile phone or a fridge. But the “choice” usually involves paying extra if you don’t pay in full. Faced with an unaffordable upfront payment, households without the means will naturally end up paying extra if they need to spread the cost.

Other bills are cheaper if you pay by direct debit. But if a household’s income fluctuates due to insecure work, then paying when you get the bill is the financially responsible, but more expensive, method.

In other words, poorer customers are given the illusion of consumer choice, when really there is only one option available.

2. Prepayment meters

Using pre-payment meters for gas and electricity, which have to be constantly topped up, typically costs households using them £131 a year more than paying by direct debit. This is because the standing charge is higher for pre-payment meters than other meters, although it is hard to see what the extra cost covers.

For our work we looked at one of the most deprived areas in the UK, where more than 11,000 households rely on electricity pre-payment meters, taking more than £730,000 a year out of the pockets of people in that community.

Certain groups are disproportionately exposed to this aspect of the poverty premium, including people with disabilities and those who are housebound. As energy bills hit record highs it’s the poorest households and most vulnerable who are already facing the worst consequences, with increasing numbers being pulled into fuel poverty.

When energy prices soared in April 2022, there were warnings that record numbers of pre-payment meter customers were “self-disconnecting” by not topping up their meters.

3. Higher insurance premiums

We found that low-income households often pay much more for home or car insurance because of where they live, or rather, where they can afford to live. Insurers factor in a perceived risk to vehicles and property, depending on the neighbourhood.

With motor insurance for example, taking the same profile of person and vehicle, the extra cost for insurance in a deprived area rose sharply from £74 on average in 2016 to £298 in 2019. Households in deprived rural areas where car ownership is a necessity are even more vulnerable to this premium than areas of higher deprivation in cities.

While our work suggests that the poverty premium for home insurance is less, unlike car insurance it is not a legal requirement. The UK’s financial regulator has warned that the cost of living crisis could force people to cancel or cut back on insurance costs, with potentially ruinous consequences – and if the worst happened low-income households would be unlikely to have the means to replace essential items.

4. Financial services

The poverty premium can even be seen in the very act of accessing money, through paying to withdraw cash from fee-charging cash machines or through higher-interest loans and credit cards. It is estimated that around 1,700 cash machines in the UK switched from being free to charging a fee at the start of 2019. These changes were more common in deprived areas.

Since 2014, major regulation has dramatically changed the consumer credit landscape in the UK, with the number of high-cost, short-term lenders falling by almost one-third between 2016 and 2020. This has led to a recent surge in pawnbroking, where people use use items they own (such as jewellery) as collateral for short-term loans. With consumer borrowing rising sharply, there is a clear a need for access to affordable credit by low-income households to manage low or unstable incomes.

These four aspects of the poverty premium can be hugely damaging to already precarious household incomes. But they are entirely fixable.

The UK charity Fair By Design, for example, which campaigns to end the poverty premium, suggests various measures. These could include the UK’s financial regulator stepping in to stop the insurers charging extra for “non-standard” billing methods, and introducing a price cap on all forms of credit. It also recommends that the energy regulator should prevent companies charging customers more for not paying by direct debit.

Elsewhere there have been calls for changes to charges for different kinds of payment

With more households choosing between heating, eating or meeting essential costs, the need for action has never been more pressing. As the temporary £20 Universal Credit uplift showed, small sums can make a big difference to people on low incomes. Relatively simple actions by industry, government and regulators could significantly reduce these premiums, and make a huge difference to millions of lives.

Sara Davies, Senior Research Fellow, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Author: Olivia Farrell, Sport, Exercise and Health (SEH-comms@bristol.ac.uk)

Partnership with JogOn 

The University of Bristol’s Sport, Exercise and Health (SEH) team recently launched a partnership with JogOn, an organisation aiming to remove 1 million running shoes from landfill. According to experts, running shoes can take 1000 years to break down in landfill, and many are marketed as only lasting for a few hundred miles. Instead, JogOn redistributes these to people who can benefit from them.

As part of this sustainable initiative, SEH are providing collection points for people to deposit their old shoes across three University sport facilities. All you need to do is tie the pair of shoes together using the shoelaces and drop them into the boxes for collection.

 

Where do the shoes go?

• Some go to charities (e.g. UK based refugee charities)
• Some to NGOs (targeting poor foot health as a factor in other issues)
• Some go to 11 microeconomy hubs around the world – where local groups can resell in local economy
• End-of-life trainers will go for shredding to then be used in other things (pathways, play areas, etc.) – out of the 2000 pairs they have collected, fewer than 12 were unusable for anything else

 

Where are the collection points?

• Indoor Sports Centre
• Coombe Dingle Sports Complex
• Richmond Building Pool

 

Bristol Run Series 

Good physical and mental health means knowing what works best for you and building healthy habits into your life. Physical exercise is a proven way to release endorphins and boost your wellbeing.

The Bristol Run Series offers our staff, students and alumni a fun, accessible and affordable way to get into running as part of a community.  Plus, as part of the Run Series, University staff, students and alumni can get discounted entry to the Great Bristol Run on 25 September – sign up here for staff discount. This is also a great opportunity to raise money for a good cause – perhaps one which tackles poverty and inequality – through sponsorship. Last year the Run Series raised over £1800 for their selected charities Healthy Minds and NHS Charities Together, and participants are also welcome to fundraise for a charity of their choice.

 

For more information, please email: SEH-comms@bristol.ac.uk

 

Introduction

On the afternoon of Thursday 30th June 2022, the Bristol Poverty Institute (BPI) brought together friends, colleagues and associates from a range of organisations to showcase, celebrate and explore poverty-relevant research at the University of Bristol and beyond at a Showcase Event held at the Bristol Hotel in central Bristol. This event explored a range of topics including global poverty, the cost-of-living-crisis, decolonising development, multidimensional poverty, (il)licit livelihoods and drugs policies, and social, digital and cultural lives of minoritized older adults. It also highlighted research taking place in a wide range of geographical contexts, from local analyses in Bristol to projects in Somali/Somaliland and Bangladesh, a wider project across several African countries, and poverty on a global scale. The delegate pack – including speaker biographies and talk abstracts – is available on the BPI website, along with slide decks from the presentations and pdfs of the posters displayed at the Showcase.

The event began with an introductory talk from Professor Agnes Nairn, Pro-Vice Chancellor for Global Engagement and Professor of Management, providing a brief introduction to the University of Bristol and our strengths in poverty-relevant research. She also introduced the University’s new Bristol Hub for Gambling Harms Research, which she co-leads. Over the next five years this multidisciplinary Research Centre will seek to build greater understanding and evidence around the growing and diverse impact of gambling harms across Great Britain, drawing upon expertise from a wide range of academics across the University as well as local, national and international collaborators. Agnes provided an overview of the programme for the Showcase, and introduced our fantastic cohort of speakers.

Ending World Poverty

We then moved on to a presentation from the founder and Director of the Bristol Poverty Institute, Professor David Gordon, who gave a thought-provoking presentation on Ending World Poverty. David highlighted how evidenced-informed policies will be key to tackling worrying, and escalating, levels of poverty, particularly in the wake of the pandemic. He then shared some staggering statistics on the pandemic, including estimates that COVID has caused around 20million excess deaths and significantly damaged both national and global economies and disproportionally impacted those in poverty. David warned that all of the gains that have been made to tackle extreme poverty in recent decades will have been reversed if current trends continue, noting how pandemics have always done greater harm to the poor and vulnerable. For example, food insecurity in the UK has now doubled since 2018 and is continuing to increase rapidly, and 1 in 5 children are now living in households where people are going hungry. He then went on to outline the ‘Bristol method’ of measuring poverty through multidimensional analysis, highlighting that we will need to better understand the extent and nature of poverty in each country to inform effective policy. He emphasised how poverty is caused primarily by structural factors not by individual behaviour, and ended with a quote from Thomas Paine from 1791 which outlined what we ought to seek to achieve through effective policy and practice.

The slides from this presentation are available via this link.

 

Posters

David’s presentation was followed by a break, where participants were encouraged to engage with the three posters which were on display in the refreshments space:

• A ‘Poverty-free Model Village’- A pilot project addressing multidimensional poverty in rural Bangladesh, Dr Rabeya Khatoon, Khalil Ahmed, Md. Mizanur Rahman, Md. Shafiqur Rashid, Asim Kumar Sarker and Fatema Ruhee
• (Il)licit livelihoods in Africa: Drug policy and reproduction of poverty, Dr Lala Ireland, Dr Clemence Rusenga and Dr Gernot Klantschnig
• Researching with communities at the margins: Exploring lived experiences of social, digital and cultural participation with minoritized older adults, Dr Helen Manchester, Prof. Kirsten Cater, Dr Tot Foster, Dr Paul Clarke, Dr Kirsty Sedgman, Dr Tim Senior, Dr Stuart Gray and Dr Alice Willatt

A pdf of each poster is available to view on the BPI website.

 

Tackling the cost of living crisis for low-income UK households

Following the break we recommenced with a joint presentation on the cost of living crisis and the ‘poverty premium’ from Ms Sara Davies and Mr Jamie Evans, who are researchers based in the Personal Finance Research Centre in the School for Geographical Sciences. Jamie kicked things off, highlighting how the number of households in serious difficulties has increased significantly in the last year or so, with over half of households reporting that their finances are worse than they were pre-pandemic. He reported that some groups are more effected than others, with groups such as low-income earners, social renters, single parents, household with disabled person(s) and larger families all more affected than others. Jamie then went on to introduce the key concept of the ‘poverty premium’, whereby the poor are effectively paying more for essential services including food and utilities.

This led onto Sara’s portion of the presentation, which delved into the poverty premium in more detail. She highlighted how many of the suggested solutions to tackling the cost of living crisis weren’t necessarily appropriate for those in poverty. For example, the advice to “shop around” is not practical for those reliant on public transport or accessing supermarkets by foot, and they also do not have the financial flexibility to buy in bulk to save money overall. Sara noted how the market is also penalising people for making the choices which are necessary for them, such as choosing to ‘pay upon receipt’ for their utility bills rather than setting up a direct debit, or taking out payday loans or a high-interest credit card to cover immediate costs. She therefore highlighted how structural circumstances has a bigger impact than choice, and indeed how people do not always have access to that choice anyway. For example, pre-payment meters for electricity, which are more common in lower income homes, are actually more expensive with a higher standing charge than other electricity meters, so even with minimal use bills can be unaffordable. Sara therefore summarised that the poverty premium represents a mismatch between the needs and circumstances of low-income households and the markets that serve them. She additionally highlighted how there are big regional differences in how poverty premiums are incurred, which in many ways reflects the geographical distribution of poverty. Examples included the fact that fee-paying ATMs are more common in poorer areas than wealthier ones, and the fact that car insurance premiums tend to be higher in deprived rural areas. and She therefore concluded by sharing her hope that there would be impetus and opportunity through the government’s ‘Levelling Up’ agenda to address some of these inequalities.

The slides from this presentation are available via this link.

 

Decolonising Development: Academics, Practitioners and Collaboration

The final presentation came from Professor Eric Herring, a Professor of World Politics in the School for Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS). This talk was entitled Decolonising Development and explored how academics and practitioners around the world can collaborate in an equitable way, identifying and challenges some of the colonial legacies in development research. Eric framed this talk in the context of his own journey into collaborative work with partners in Somali and Somaliland, which are effectively separate entities but technically one country and is therefore particularly complex. He highlighted how this is one of the poorest countries in the world which is currently experiencing an enormous humanitarian emergency, with around half of its population needing urgent assistance right now and high potential for widespread famine. Eric introduced how bow Somali and Somaliland are pioneers in ‘mobile money’, which has replaced formal banking in the region with even relatively poor people using mobile phones for their money management. He revealed that the global aid industry has, surprisingly, never engaged with these companies despite their great success, not only persisting through challenging times including civil war and operating effectively in a complex clan-based society, but also managing to be an equal opportunities employer. Eric has therefore been trying to connect the companies and local researchers who work with them with people who may learn from them, but has encountered several challenges along the way. This includes, for example, the fact that many academics in Somali/Somaliland do not have PhDs or publish in peer-reviewed journals, and are therefore not seen as an appealing partner for international academics and they cannot compete with ‘powerhouse’ institutions in neighbouring countries such as Kenya and Uganda. Additional challenges include the insecurity of the region, the fact they are experiencing an extreme humanitarian emergency, huge rates of illiteracy, and a university system with next to no research capacity. He therefore highlighted how decolonising processes therefore requires a deep understand of the context and how to operate there. He went on to provide a case study from his own work with Somali First – a  joint initiative between Somali social enterprise Transparency Solutions and the University of Bristol – which promotes Somali-led development. He expressed gratitude to the University of Bristol for being willing to take a risk and get behind this initiative from the early stages and agreeing to a formalised strategic partnership. Eric concluded by highlighting the fact that practices and perceptions from the colonial period are still embedded in a lot of development work – including in the use of colonial languages such as English in research – and that identifying colonial legacies and actually doing things differently will be key to achieving positive change with a renewed focus on co-production.

The slides from this presentation are available via this link.

Closing remarks

The Bristol Poverty Institute Showcase was brought to completion with closing remarks from the Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research and Enterprise Professor Phil Taylor. He provided a summary of the talks and posters presented at the Showcase, and also reflected on some other topical issues around poverty in his own field. In particular, he noted that there are an estimated 6.5million people in the UK currently in fuel poverty, and with the upcoming further price cap rise in the autumn this is only going to get worse. Phil therefore outlined ambitions to work with the Bristol Poverty Institute and external partners on tackling issues at the nexus between health, climate change and fuel poverty. In closing the event Phil thanked the speakers, poster authors, organisers and attendees for their fantastic contributions to the showcase event, and encouraged everyone to stick around and continue the conversation at the drinks reception.

 

 

Thank you to everyone who attended and participated in our first in-person event in over two years – we hope you enjoyed it, and that we get to meet again soon!

The presentation slides, speaker biographies and abstracts, and pdfs of the posters are all available on the BPI website.

The University of Bristol supports all its staff to take one day of volunteering leave per year to help make a positive impact in the local community. This December the Bristol Poverty Institute (BPI) brought together teams of staff from across the University to volunteer at a local food bank in the run up to Christmas, helping out a good cause and having a really rewarding, enjoyable day with colleagues in the process.

The BPI team are acutely aware of how many people now unfortunately have to rely on food banks, particularly with recent changes to Universal Credit, the impact of COVID-19 on livelihoods, and rising fuel prices, and we therefore felt that this was a good opportunity to help make a contribution. The food bank also offered flexibility in terms of timings (for example, if someone needed to leave early due to caring responsibilities), as well as disabled parking, access and toilet facilities, therefore making it an accessible and inclusive option for us.

We wanted these volunteering days to also be an opportunity for members of the BPI community to get to know one another, and to mix with colleagues who have a shared ethos but whose paths may not ordinarily cross. We were delighted to bring together 17 volunteers representing academia, Research and Enterprise Division (RED), the University Research Institutes (URIs), and Policy Press across three volunteering days in December, although unfortunately one date was cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances.

The volunteering days themselves were fantastic; the staff at the food bank were so welcoming, friendly, and helpful, and the work was really rewarding. Our primary task was to sort through mountains of donations, writing expiry dates on everything so the warehouse team could distribute them in date order to minimise waste. We were also tasked with pulling out and sorting all the Christmas goodies (including more custard than you could ever imagine!) ready for handing out in the coming days and weeks to make the festive season a little brighter. It was wonderful to see how much people had given, but at the same time humbling to see how much was needed and to be reminded of how much we take for granted. The fact we were only there for a day meant we could only make a small contribution to such a mammoth endeavour, but everyone involved found it so rewarding to see the stacks of crates being wheeled into the warehouse at the end of the day as a result of our hard work.

 

We’re really looking forward to going back, hopefully this time next year, and all came away with a renewed drive to be more mindful about popping something in the food bank donation boxes every time we go to the supermarket or making a monetary donation when we can, as well as contributing to knowledge and trying to influence policy that may help to reduce the need for food banks in the future. Most supermarkets have donation boxes near the checkout, and many of them include a list of recommended/requested items. You can also find lists on food bank websites of the types of items they most frequently need (see the Trussell Trust website, for example), with lists of non-food items such as sanitary products, nappies, laundry detergent and toiletries alongside regular food items including:

• Cereal
• Soup
• Pasta
• Rice
• Tinned tomatoes
• Pasta sauce
• Lentils, beans and pulses
• Tinned meat
• Tinned vegetables
• Tea/coffee
• Tinned fruit
• Biscuits
• UHT milk
• Fruit juice

This was the second time the BPI have organised volunteering days. In 2019 a team of academics and professional services staff came together for a great day working at the Hartcliffe Community Farm in South Bristol association with the Matthew Tree Project, which provides support for people on the verge of homelessness and crisis. This includes both opportunities for members of the community to learn about growing food and to benefit from the fruits (and vegetables!) of their labour, quite literally. It was a really enjoyable, but tiring, day, with activities including digging out rubble to clear new spaces for vegetable beds, planting out new seedlings, and laying a bark chip path to help people to move around the site and access different parts of the farm more easily. Check out our news story for more details.

We hope to be able to run more volunteering days in 2022, subject to restrictions. We are hoping to do one outdoors activity in the summertime, and another food bank activity in the lead up to Christmas. If you want to be kept in the loop of plans and activities, please sign up to the BPI mailing list by emailing bristol-poverty-institute@bristol.ac.uk.

This blog was written by Dr Tigist Grieve, Senior Research Associate in the School for Policy Studies at the University of Bristol and Member of Bristol Poverty Institute’s (BPI) Advisory Board. It was posted earlier in the summer on the University’s International Development Research Group blog, and has been reproduced here with their kind permission.

The University of Bristol’s Faculty of Social Sciences and Law International Development Research Group was recently approached by the BBC for their views on the UK Aid cut. Professor Guy Howard, Global Research Chair Environmental and Infrastructure Resilience and BPI Advisory Board member, outlined how the impact of the reduction will be devastating for those most impoverished.

Funding cuts in the middle of a global pandemic, as the public sector is struggling and where health care provisions are stretched, is detrimental to those already most marginalised and at-risk including girls and women in low income countries. Despite the renewed commitment from the UK at the 2019 International Conference on Population and Development in Nairobi – the ICPD25 Nairobi Summit – the withdrawal of funding to organisations such as the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) halts the progress made so far in advancing the rights and dignity of women and girls globally.

The University of Bristol (UoB) is a founding member of the UNFPA’s University Network, TransformU, and UoB’s researchers and its Perivoli Africa Research Centre were at the UK “On the Road to Nairobi UNFPA ICPD25” Parliamentary Reception hosted by Baroness Sugg CBE at the House of Lords. UoB’s researchers subsequently shared their work on sexual and reproductive health and rights at the Nairobi summit as well as at a “Translating commitments to actions” side event at the Aga Khan University.

The ICPD25 Summit catalysed significant economic and political commitment to build on the progress made since the inaugural ICPD Summit in Cairo to help accelerate the UNFPA’s “3 Zeroes Agenda“. While many areas are affected by the UKAid cuts, the significant drop in funding to the UNFPA and others will pose a serious challenge in translating these important commitments into action.

 

 

 

You can read Professor Guy Howard’s interview with BBC Newsbeat as part of the following article ‘UK foreign aid cut: Where does it go and what is it used for?‘. Professor Howard is co-lead of UoB’s Faculty of Social Sciences and Law International Development Research Group, interim Director of the Cabot Institute for the Environment, and a member of the BPI Advisory Board.

This blog was written by the authors of the Unequal Pandemic: Clare Bambra (Professor of Public Health, Population Health Sciences Institute at Newcastle University); Katherine Smith (Professor of Public Health Policy at University of Strathclyde); and Julia Lynch (Professor of Political Science at University of Pennsylvania). It was originally posted on the blog Transforming Society and has been re-posted here with their kind permission. 

In 1931 Edgar Sydenstricker identified inequalities in the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, reporting a significantly higher incidence among the working classes. This challenged the widely held popular, political and scientific consensus of the time that ‘the flu hit the rich and the poor alike’.

In the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, there have been parallel claims made by politicians and the media – that we are ‘all in it together’ and that the COVID-19 virus ‘does not discriminate’.

But we can dispel this emerging myth of COVID-19 as an ‘equality of opportunity’ disease, by showing how, just as 100 years ago, the pandemic is experienced unequally across society. COVID-19 and inequality are a syndemic – a perfect storm.

Our new book delves into international data and accounts, reaching the conclusion that the pandemic is unequal in four ways:

The pandemic kills unequally: COVID-19 deaths are twice as high in the most deprived neighbourhoods of England than in the most affluent, and infection rates are higher in the more deprived regions such as the north-east of England and in urban areas. There are also significant inequalities by ethnicity and race, with the mortality of ethnic minorities in the UK considerably higher than expected, and the death rates of black Americans in US cities such as Chicago far higher than for their white counterparts. This is because of the interaction of the pandemic with existing social, economic and health inequalities.

The pandemic is experienced unequally: the COVID-19 ‘lockdowns’ have resulted in a significant increase in social isolation and confinement within the home and immediate neighbourhood for an average of 10–12 weeks. The social and economic experiences of this lockdown are unequal, as lower-income workers are more likely to experience job and income loss, live in higher-risk urban and overcrowded environments, and have higher exposure to the virus by occupying key worker roles.

The pandemic impoverishes unequally: COVID-19 and the lockdowns have resulted in an unprecedented shock to the economy with widespread predictions of the worst recession for 300 years. This economic devastation will result in job losses, wage reductions, higher debt and more poverty, as well as increases in the ‘deaths of despair’. However, the social and geographical distribution of these economic impacts will be unequal – with low-income workers, women and ethnic minorities bearing the brunt.

These pandemic inequalities are political: the unequal impacts of COVID-19 were not inevitable – the pandemic was a predictable event and its unequal effects could have been mitigated or avoided through better preparation. The original inequalities leading to these unequal impacts were a result of prior political choices, and policy makers could have chosen to address the unequal impacts of the pandemic or not. Governments responded differently and those countries with higher rates of social inequality and less generous social security systems had a more unequal pandemic.

So, COVID-19 is a syndemic of infectious disease and inequalities. It has killed unequally, been experienced unequally and will impoverish unequally. These health inequalities, before, during and after the pandemic are a political choice – with governments effectively choosing who gets to live and who gets to die. Our book concludes by showing how we can learn from COVID-19 quickly to prevent inequality growing and to reduce health inequalities in the future.

Clare Bambra is Professor of Public Health, Population Health Sciences Institute at Newcastle University.

Katherine Smith is Professor of Public Health Policy at University of Strathclyde.

Julia Lynch is Professor of Political Science at University of Pennsylvania.

This post was originally written for the blog Transforming Society and has been re-posted here with their kind permission.