Becky is a Research Fellow at the Centre on Household Assets and Savings Management (CHASM) at the University of Birmingham. Her research explores how unpaid carers and disabled people navigate the welfare benefits system, and the vital but often overlooked role that welfare rights advisers play in helping people access their entitlements. This qualitative research focuses on understanding how public services can create, exacerbate or prevent vulnerability and harm, while identifying opportunities for more inclusive, rights-based approaches to policy and service design. She is particularly interested in how policy is experienced in everyday life, and how public services can reduce rather than reinforce disadvantage.
Becky is also interested in the financial wellbeing of kinship families. Working in partnership with the charity Kinship, she and colleagues at the Centre for Care published a report highlighting the contribution to society made by kinship carers. She enjoys working in partnership with people with lived experience, practitioners and policy-makers at all stages of the process. She is passionate about ensuring that research evidence drives change which improves the financial security and wellbeing of people who are systematically disadvantaged and excluded in society. At the Centre for Care, she led the production of evidence submissions to parliamentary inquiries and government consultations, organised policy events in Westminster, and worked with stakeholders across the UK to increase the impact and reach of social care research.
Before joining academia, Becky spent more than a decade working across the voluntary sector, the NHS and local government in a variety of programme management, commissioning and service improvement roles. This included leading work on personalised cancer care in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets and supporting the commissioning and transformation of specialist Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) across South Yorkshire. These experiences continue to shape her research questions and understanding of how policy decisions are translated into practice, where implementation succeeds or fails, and where systems create unintended barriers for people.
Becky holds a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics and an MSc in African Studies from the University of Oxford. She has also undertaken postgraduate study in public engagement in health research at King’s College London.