CHASM is a multidisciplinary research centre for financial security, well-being, and inclusion. We produce research that matters and use it to advocate for a fairer, more financially inclusive society.
Real world research problems do not arise in disciplinary, narrow categories and neither do their solutions. And so what our very varied and diverse research expertise enables us to do is to look at problems from multiple perspectives, to look at them holistically, and to come up with more workable and effective solutions to those problems.
In 2010, the centre was officially launched as a collaboration between the School of Social Policy and the Birmingham Business School. Over the years, our research agenda has expanded and broadened to include investigation of poverty, precarity, debt, later life financial well-being. So pensions, paying for care and much more. But at its heart, CHASM remains a research centre focused on understanding and addressing the causes and consequences of inequality, of opportunity and outcome.
Alongside growing wealth inequality over recent decades, we've also seen a retrenchment of welfare provision for financial security and well-being and a sort of shrinking of the public safety net. And it's those with least resources, both financial knowledge based resources and otherwise, that are disproportionately affected.And this creates real significant inequality. And we're really interested in understanding what this shift means for people, why it's happened and what the consequences are across the life course and in different phases of people's lives, over the life course and in different phases of people's lives.
We're an applied, policy relevant research centre, but we're also an academic research centre. So the principles of academic rigor and independence inform everything we do. And we keep that constant as we design and we deliver our research projects in close collaboration with stakeholders in the public, private and third sectors. We do this in order to try and ensure that our research has the greatest impact, the greatest reach. Some examples of our research impact include: having provided the most consistent form of evidence on financial exclusion in the UK over more than ten years now. We're also informing the Pensions Commission on their current work, looking at sustainability, adequacy and fairness of pension systems. Locally, CHASM Research has transformed understanding of how the cost of living crisis has affected low income households in particularly deprived areas of Birmingham. And this work has really been transformative in informing housing association policy, parliamentary analysis and giving voice to the communities who are affected.
Some of the biggest changes over the last 16 years or so since the inception of CHASM have been the broader social, political and economic sort of landscape and environment that we now live in. In fact CHASM’s work’s never been more important as people's financial lives are increasingly uncertain. As people face more and more financial shocks, wage stagnation, interest rate rises, the ongoing and enduring high cost of living made worse by recent geopolitical instabilities. And all of these things are having major effects on family finances, on people's financial security and wellbeing. So our research is crucial to understanding how all of that is experienced and suggesting ways of improving outcomes for people.
My hopes for the future of CHASM: To continue doing what we're doing, but to do more of it and better, to do more world-leading transformative research on these vital policy issues so that more people can achieve greater financial security, wellbeing and inclusion due to changes in policy and practice informed by our evidence.
