Dr Kris Fuzi: A year in review

We look back on the academic year 2024-25 from Dr Kris Fuzi’s perspective. Kris joined CHASM in September 2023, just prior to obtaining his PhD. He is currently CHASM theme lead for Risk and Financial Wellbeing in Later Life.

A key highlight for Kris has been the completion of his fieldwork looking into the financial insecurity experienced by tenants in the private rental sector. Kris interviewed 50 private tenants across the West Midlands and Greater Manchester regions.

Preliminary findings from the research indicate that private rent is unaffordable for the majority across the two regions and private tenants have felt steep rises in rental costs alongside increased costs in other areas such as food and utilities. Private tenants in both regions also indicate a concerning link between work and housing, where salaries have failed to increase in line with other costs and private tenants are increasingly reducing costs on already constrained budgets. This is having an overall negative impact on private tenants’ sense of wellbeing. Constrained budgets are inevitably leading to insufficient short-term and long-term savings for many private tenants.

At the same time, Kris has also been busy producing outputs from his PhD research, Precarious Lives and Financial Behaviour. Last summer, Kris published a blog with the Austerity and Altered Life-Courses project at The University of Manchester. Kris argued here for the significance of understanding consumer’s time perspectives in relation to saving and pension decision-making.

More recently, Kris submitted evidence to the Low Pay Commission arguing for an increase in the National Living Wage and National Minimum Wage (NLW and NMW, respectively) alongside strengthening employee rights and protections. His evidence was included in the Commission’s final report, National Minimum Wage Low Pay Commission Report (2024), which also quoted Kris’s reference to the 'flexibility trap'. Low-wage, NMW and NLW workers are particularly susceptible to this flexibility trap, where increasingly contracts are offering flexibility but, in reality, flexible working practices are placing the financial risk of supply and demand onto workers.

Kris later published an Impact Brief with Nest Insight offering key insights into his PhD research and the policy implications for the future of pension planning for precarious workers.

Kris has also been working on research engagement activity, including with two leading organisations in and thought leadership. In November, Kris contributed a working paper to a workshop of academics who came together at Goldsmiths, University of London. There they explored the intersectionality of everyday financial risk. Coming out of this workshop, Kris and several other academics have submitted a panel proposal to the Finance & Society 2025 Conference in Copenhagen to widen the discussion of everyday financial risk. In January Kris delivered a masterclass session with the highly respected think-tank, Resolution Foundation, where he presented findings from his precarious work and private rental sector research. Kris put forward the idea that a more contextual approach is needed in social policy that calls for greater communication between separated policy areas, such as work and housing.