We spend more on working-age social security than education, or the police and defence combined (Hoynes et al., 2023), and it is the policy instrument most directly able to reduce poverty.
As we look across the next decade and beyond, we need to do all we can to improve our social security system, and to better understand the consequences of increased devolution in this domain. We need to make sure that any future increases to devolution are underpinned by robust evidence bases. We also need to learn from place-based differences in social security that already exist so that policy change can be grounded in an understanding of what works, in what contexts, and for whom. Our programme of research responds to and will directly meet these needs, and – by so doing – has scope to improve policymaking and, subsequently, the lives of millions of families across the UK.