Safety Nets

Funder: Nuffield Foundation
Awarded: £1.3 million (Ulster share £100,000)
Duration: May 2024 to October 2027
Staff involved: Mark Simpson, Ciara Fitzpatrick, Ruth Patrick (University of York, project lead), collaborators at six UK universities, Child Poverty Action Group, Resolution Foundation and our Experts by Experience panel

Description

Devolution has created significant place-based variations in social security law, policy, and practice. Scotland and Northern Ireland deliver near-universal mitigation of selected cuts to benefits. Scotland has introduced new benefits, such as the Scottish Child Payment, and Wales is exploring increasing their devolved powers on social security.

At the local level, a patchwork of discretionary schemes means there are real differences in the support someone can receive based on where they live.

The Labour Government has shown a commitment to doing more to facilitate collaboration between policymakers working at different levels of government, and has announced plans to increase devolution within England, and to promote the devolution of employment support.

They have also committed to reforming Universal Credit, and here there are opportunities to learn from differences in how this benefit has been rolled out across the UK.

Our project will build new evidence and share this directly with policymakers. In the first phase of the project, we are:

• Mapping existing evidence on devolved cash and in-kind support to low-income families
• Conducting a large-scale qualitative examination of how claimants navigate and experience devolved social security and to what extent they are aware of differences across the four nations of the UK
• Exploring local authority discretionary support across the UK through desk-based analysis, interviews, and analysis of data from the existing Homelessness Monitor

More details are available on the Safety Nets project website.