Research projects

Overview This project was concerned with the impact on workers, their families and neighbourhoods of the closure of the Anglesey Aluminium (AA) smelter in September 2009, formerly one of the major employers in the Holyhead area. Previous studies of the impact of factory closure on local communities have focused on the individual impacts of redundancy as…

Overview The aim of this project was to investigate public sentiments in Wales towards immigrants and immigration. The monitoring of what people think about immigration has come to feature regularly within numerous national and cross-national surveys and opinion polls. But there has been little or no attempt to consider the nature of these sentiments at…

Overview The Women’s Turnaround project aimed to engage women offenders so that they make necessary changes to stop offending, following a holistic, woman-centred, service model recommended by the Corston Report in 2007. This project explored the women’s and stakeholder’s perspectives on what women needed and whether the Turnaround project in North Wales had achieved its aim…

Pay and Job Quality: Is the Grass Greener in the Public Sector? The unadjusted public-private sector pay differential has attracted considerable political interest since the coalition government came to power in the UK in 2010. It has been used to justify changes to pay setting arrangements and the imposition of pay restraint on the public sector. However, previous analyses have…

Overview Work has long been acknowledged as an important social determinant of health with research being conducted as to how a range of workplace, personal and job characteristics influence occupational health. Recent research has demonstrated the importance of the economic environment in terms of understanding movements in rates of workplace injury, both in terms of…

Overview The involvement of workers and their representatives in consultation on arrangements for managing risks to health and safety at work is a key element of the requirements of the EU Framework Directive 89/391. While there are differences in provisions between member states that reflect national differences in regulatory styles and labour relations cultures and practices,…

Overview The key aim of this project, funded by emda (the East Midlands Development Agency), was to provide a detailed assessment of the issue of in-work poverty in the East Midlands and its implications for regional economic performance. The project provided: a systematic literature review on in-work poverty; an analysis of the distribution of low pay workers…

Funding: £119,000 The project was centred on young people and housing and had the following aims; to determine the profile of the housing system in 2020 to ascertain young people’s housing aspirations and how they fit with the current housing system and the system likely to exist in 2020 to identify the ‘new’ winners and…

Aims The aims of the project were to examine the pay statistics for Wales, for 2008 and other relevant years to determine possible reasons for the widening of the pay gap between women and men. Methodology The research methodology was desk based analysis of published data sets, primarily, Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE)…

This research aimed to improve understanding of the implications of introducing a living wage policy in Wales. In March 2009, The Welsh Assembly Government (WAG) commissioned an exploratory study into the implications of introducing a Living Wage in Wales. This report presents the interim findings from the first phase of the analysis. The objective of…

The National Equality Panel’s report An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK provided a milestone in our understanding of relationships between people’s characteristics and their financial position. Through detailed analysis of complex datasets, some newly available, it charted in depth how ‘inequalities in people’s economic outcomes – such as earnings, income and wealth – are related…