24 Nov 2015

New book, called 'Hard Times: Inequality, Recession, Aftermath', reveals how austerity puts civic engagement at risk

People living in poverty are less likely to have the things that money can’t buy like friendship, trust and involvement in the community, according to new research.

And although the country is officially out of recession, the government’s austerity policy – set to be reinforced in this week’s Comprehensive Spending Review – puts civic engagement and social trust within poorer neighbourhoods at risk.

The findings are published in a new book, Hard Times, written by The Guardian journalist Tom Clark and the University’s Professor of Sociology Anthony Heath, who use hard numbers to expose a society defined by division in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

The authors will be speaking at the 20th anniversary celebration of quantitative social research at The University of Manchester on Wednesday - the same day as the government's Spending Review.

Clark explains: “The book gauges the effects of the recession using the Prime Minister’s own metrics: rates of volunteering, a measure of his ’Big Society‘, and general well-being – the GWB he once suggested mattered more than the GDP.

“Poorer parts of the country were more savaged by the recession and it was there, too, that we found that Cameron’s Big Society shrivelled most dramatically.”

Research for Hard Times found that people who lost their jobs during the recession were less engaged in civic activity than contemporaries who kept their jobs during the recession – and they look set to remain more isolated for many years to come.

Clark added: “It is the opposite of what you’d hope and expect, with many of us assuming that communities would pull together when times get tough. But, in fact, people became less trusting of others, less likely to share and more isolated.”

Over the last two decades major quantitative social research has been conducted by The Cathie Marsh Institute for Social Research including work on ethnic segregation, the British Election Study and measuring social inequalities in Britain.

Other guest speakers at the 20th anniversary celebration include:

· Professor Jane Elliott - Economic and Social Research Council Chief Executive

· Professor Patrick Sturgis - National Council for Research Methods (NCRM)

· Director Dr Omar Khan - Runnymede Trust Director

The Cathie Marsh Institute for Social Research provides robust data to inform policy makers and has focused on the social inequalities in Britain. It was named after Cathie Marsh who was a leading quantitative sociologist in the UK and had begun to obtain international recognition for her ground breaking work on census data. Sadly she did not live to see the success of her endeavours.