Podcast: Economists in the Wild – Reflections from a Social Policy Conference

This week, Brodie Gillan is joined by Emma Congreve, Hannah Randolph, and Christy McFadyen to reflect on their recent trip to the Social Policy Association Conference 2025, held in York. This year the conference was joint with the East Asian Social Policy Research Network.

The team discusses key themes from the conference, including big-picture issues around employment, child poverty, and the links between housing and health – drawing on research they presented during the event. The episode also touches on broader policy discussions, such as Labour’s first year in government and the ongoing debate around tax reform and a potential wealth tax. 

You can find out more about the work we mentioned at: https://fraserofallander.org/ 

Find out more about the SPA and the conference here: https://social-policy.org.uk/ 

Timestamps

(01:55) The Social Policy Association (SPA) and the East Asian Social Policy Research Network (EASP) 

(04:15) The Hospitality Sector – Serving the Future Project  

(07:30) Learning Disabilities & Employment  

(10:30) Child Poverty  

(14:40) Housing & Health  

(19:10) Labour One Year in Office: Tax Policy & Wealth Taxes?  

(24:30) Key Takeaways from the Conference

Transcript

00:00:03 Ben Cooper

Hello, 2025 marks a significant year for the Fraser of Allander Institute. Founded in 1975, the Institute celebrates 50 years of leading economic research in Scotland. Given this, we have a series of exciting events and content planned for the remainder of this year to mark this milestone.

This includes our anniversary conference on the 18th and 19th of September this year at the University of Strathclyde’s Technology and Innovation Centre. We have a number of speakers and themed sessions planned for the day in order to highlight the breadth and importance of the Economic Research being conducted across Scotland.

As well as this we have a number of other events planned, including our reception at the Scottish Parliament in December and one at the Scotland Office in London in October.

You’ll also see some unique content published in the coming months, including a podcast series with past institute directors and some articles on the history of the Institute, as well as some other eye-catching covers from some of our reports from over the years in the coming months.

In order to be kept up to date with any of these events and to be the first to know about our 50th anniversary publications, visit our website, fraserofallander.org and you can join our mailing list.

If you are interested in engaging with us also, whether you previously work for or with the institute, why not get in touch? We have a designated 50th anniversary e-mail fraser50@strath.ac.uk. We hope you’re as excited as we are and look forward to celebrating this exciting milestone with as many of you as possible.

00:01:32 Brodie Gillan

Hello and welcome back to the Fraser of Allander Institute podcast. My name is Brodie Gillan, and I’m an economist here at the institute.

00:01:39 Emma Congreve

Hi, I’m Emma Congreve, and I’m deputy director here at the institute.

00:01:44 Hannah Randolph

Hi, I’m Hannah Randolph and I am also an economist at the Institute.

00:01:50 Chirsty McFadyen

And I’m Chirsty McFadyen, also an economist at the Institute.

00:01:54 Brodie Gillan

This week on the podcast, we’re taking a short break from our usual economic analysis to have a chat with some of the team about a recent trip that we took to the Social Policy Association Conference in York.

This year, the conference theme was Go your own way: Social policy and an era of fracturing solidarities. What this really means, or how I interpreted it at least, is that all around the world, we are seeing increasingly fraught conditions economically, socially, politically and environmentally.

We’re seeing growing divisions both between and within countries, and that’s putting new pressures on how we think about addressing shared economic and social challenges. That divergence, it really came through in a lot of the discussions, especially as the conference took place exactly one year after the election of the Labour Government, which we’re going to come on to a little bit later in the podcast.

This year’s conference was a joint event with the East Asian Social Policy Research Network, so there was a lot of different researchers and academics from various East Asian countries, which really gave some fascinating comparative perspectives.

Chirsty, she’s going to chat a little bit about this more later in the podcast, but it was a really great way to hear about how sort of similar challenges like ageing populations, inequality or labour market change are playing out in very different countries and policy contexts.

First of all, of course, the conference was also a chance for us to share some of our own work here at the Fraser Allander Institute. We presented a few strands of our ongoing work that sits at the intersection of economic analysis and social policy.

First up, Chirsty and I were both presenting from our work on the Serving the Future project, which is looking at Scotland’s hospitality sector and in-work poverty.

It’s worth saying here that Chirsty and I have done a previous podcast episode on this project, so please do listen back if you’re interested. Chirsty, could you just start off with giving us a quick overview of the Serving the Future project and what the focus of your presentation was?

00:04:05 Chirsty McFadyen

Yeah, sure, Brodie. So Serving the Future, as you said, is a project all about hospitality in Scotland. The project is very much about in-work poverty and how we can tackle in-work poverty in the industry. But it was kind of unique in the sense that we spoke to both workers and employers because we wanted to understand this issue from all sides and we were fully aware that employers had barriers that they were facing in terms of implementing things that could help workers that we maybe weren’t aware of or hadn’t been studied as much. And so with Serving the Future, we kind of wanted to get that really holistic perspective to enable – in order to enable change. So yeah, I mean we did two presentations, didn’t we? Which was nice because we were in the same session. So we were one after the other, which was good because we didn’t have to tell everyone about Serving the Future twice. But yeah, so myself and Laura Robertson from the Poverty Alliance, we did a presentation called “Engaging employers in social policy, a case study from Scotland’s hospitality industry”.

And this was going through how we engaged with employers in the Serving the Future project. So the main way that we did that was through action learning sets, which is a method where you get a group of people in similar paths of life or similar experiences. So for us, it was hospitality employers and managers getting into a room together, get them to bring up issues or problems that they’re facing in their roles as employers and managers. Let them sort of think about, solutions that they could potentially implement for that and kind of bounce off each other and ideas and stuff, and then they take some actions away and they go and work on these actions and they come back and kind of report back what what they’ve done and kind of whether it was successful or not.

So it was a really cool method and we hadn’t really used it in the Fraser before. But Poverty Alliance, who are our partners on the Serving the Future project had more experience of it. So yeah, through, through that presentation we kind of chatted about the, what, what went well in terms of the action learning sets, but also what the challenges were and things that we maybe took as, like, learning for if we were doing something like this again.

So for example, one thing that we struggled with in the project was trying to sort of get the balance between employers being able to talk about what was useful to them versus us getting conversations out of them that were related to workers and related to in-work poverty. So that was something we kind of went back and forth on quite a few times in discussion with the Poverty Alliance and kind of, we worked out how to do like better, prompting around that issue and thinking about sort of workers experiences and stuff. So that’s just like one example. But yeah. So and then Brodie, you also did a bit of a presentation on the more, the longitudinal workers’ interviews, which we talked about in the previous podcast. So yeah, it was a good session.

00:07:17 Brodie Gillan

Great, thank you, Chirsty. And yeah, I’d really encourage listeners to take a listen back to the previous episode if you’d like to find out more. So, Chirsty, you also had another hat on at the conference when you were presenting on your work to do with people with learning disabilities and them in the labour market, could you tell us a little bit more about that work?

00:07:37 Chirsty McFadyen

Sure. So yeah, myself and David Jack at the institute, we presented on the learning disabilities work, yeah, this was a really interesting session because it was kind of across different types of disability and employment and things like that.

So we spoke about kind of, the work that we’ve done on learning disabilities directly related to employment. So that was talking about our – that was talking about our reports with employers that had hired people with learning disabilities and employers that hadn’t yet had that experience and kind of thinking about what we learned from that. But then we also covered a bit about our learning disabilities financial security project, which we did with the Scottish Commission for People with Learning Disabilities recently. So thinking about the learnings from that around employment as well and and kind of bringing all those different things together. So yeah, it was kind of like we weren’t really presenting a paper as much. It was more sort of, here’s all the different things we’ve been doing around this area. And then here’s where we’re going next. So in terms of where we’re going next, what we were talking about was some work on social security that we’re going to be doing and that’s funded by Acorns to Trees. So we’re going to have a look at the Irish disability allowance, which is like the equivalent of the Universal Credit element that’s related to disability in the UK.

And because we’ve, we’ve kind of seen that it’s a little bit more generous and has more gentle tapering and things. So we’re gonna kind of compare and contrast and see what the potential like implications might be if Scotland was to implement something like that.

And then we’re also kind of looking at doing some kind of employment pilot or jumping on somebody else’s employment pilot. So Down Syndrome Scotland have got a real good pilot scheme with Specsavers that is coming up soon and it sounds really cool and it’s all about, you know, employing people with learning disabilities. So we might be doing sort of a more evaluation role around that. But yeah, it was nice, a nice crowd to kind of like bounce ideas off of and something which I think was really cool, which we’ll probably come on to later, was a lot of people were kind of really thinking about the welfare bill because the news had just kind of broke that week that Labour had kind of rebelled about the whole policy and and there was the kind of changes in votes and things, and now it’s all delayed and we don’t really know what’s happening. But I guess the, yeah, the good news is that there’s going to be sort of more consultation with third sector partners and people who support those with disabilities so, yeah, but yeah, we’ll talk about that later, probably.

00:10:19 Brodie Gillan

Yeah, definitely. It’s definitely very timely conversation, I think. And it was interesting to hear how often those sort of different experiences with precarious work and social security came up throughout the conference.

So, Hannah, you presented in a really interesting session on child poverty. Could you tell us a little bit about the work that you shared and what else came up during the session?

00:10:44 Hannah Randolph

Yes. So, I was presenting some work that Chirsty and Emma and I did, but I will give Chirsty a break from talking and I’ll talk about it. Chirsty’s across everything. But we were doing some work through last autumn and this spring on different ways that Scotland can reach its child poverty targets by 2030.

So we were doing this project just – we released the report a week before we found out that Scotland had not met its interim child poverty targets in 2023/24. So we were kind of turning, had turned our attention to the final targets and wanted to see what, kind of, the size of the challenge is for Scotland and what the magnitude of investment that might be needed from Scottish Government to meet the targets. Because this is a commitment that they’ve made and so we want to make sure that there’s kind of an evidence base to support, you know, what’s the size of the measures that they should be looking at. And that is particularly important this year because they’re working on developing their child poverty delivery plan, which will come out next spring. And that’s the final plan that will take us kind of through the last four years until we hit the, the time when the targets are due.

And so we’d done a piece of modelling which was very focused on Scottish government’s devolved levers and what they can do at a very high level. So we were looking at policies like parental – things to get more parents into work or to get parents paid better, better housing support through the benefit system and changes to Scottish Child Payment. And so what we found were that we think that with current measures in place, that relative child poverty would be about 22% in 2030 and the target is 10%. So we’ve got quite a ways to go, quite a big gap to fill. And so we tested out some different policy packages that might fill that gap and get us to the final targets. And one of the things that we took away from the report was that there’s been a lot of discussion of what getting more parents into work can do and that being the focus of anti poverty measures. But based on our modelling and modelling that other people have put out, that’s only going to get us part of the way there. So there is still a significant role for things like the social security system to kind of fill in that gap.

It’s also not going to be inexpensive, so the policy packages that we modelled, we had estimated somewhere in the realm of I think about £5 billion in 2030, others have come up with estimates that are a bit lower than that. But we are still talking about billions, which is quite a big investment in this area. And as you said, the the session that I was in was really well put together because I felt like it really showed different things that are going on to combat child poverty in Scotland from different angles. So as I said, my presentation was very kind of high level and focused on things that Scottish Government can do, but others in the session were presenting more on, you know, what are local authorities doing and how do they engage with people with lived experience of poverty to understand what they should be doing to to combat child poverty and others were focused at, you know, third sector organisations or just different angles, so it felt like a really nice kind of holistic view of what’s going on in Scotland right now with child poverty.

00:14:36 Brodie Gillan

So Emma, some of your work was in the health session and it was looking at whether Scotland’s Housing to 2040 strategy could play a role in reducing health inequalities. Could you tell us a little bit more about that session?

00:14:49 Emma Congreve

Sure. So, uh, we presented the session as part of the Scottish Health Equity Research Unit, which is a partnership between ourselves here at the Fraser of Allander Institute and the Centre for Health Policy. That’s in a different part of the university. So Fiona McHardy was the one presenting on this.

And I’m just going to cover a little bit of what we talked about in that session. I mean, as you said, it’s focused on health inequalities and housing. And we were really putting forward the well-evidenced case that housing is a key socioeconomic determinant of health inequalities.

The house you live in of course affects your health directly. If you’re living with damp and mould and cold temperatures or hot temperatures, as we’ve seen in the last week or so. But it can also have an impact on other aspects of your health. For example, if you’re living in an overcrowded home. If you’re a child who doesn’t have anywhere to do their homework, you know, all of these things can compound and make your experience of where you live crucially important for your future socioeconomic status, but also for your health here and now and in the future.

So this is one of the key things we are looking at the Scottish Health Equity Research Unit. And as you said, Brodie, Scotland does have an overriding strategy on housing called Housing to 2040, of which the affordable housing supply programme is a really big part of that. And that’s something a lot of people might have heard about, the real drive to build more homes in Scotland, particularly for social rent. Yet, we have in a housing emergency in Scotland and an acute shortage of affordable housing, rising homelessness, overcrowding in temporary accommodation, and these things have been years, if not decades, in the making. So this housing emergency was declared by a number of local authorities and then the Scottish Parliament also followed through, following a debate, to state that Scotland has housing emergency. So we have this this dynamic of of a of an ambitious plan for housing to 2040. Yet, an acknowledgement that we’re in an emergency crisis situation with housing, so we’ve been exploring those two, sort of, those two things at the same time. You know, to actually understand what difference the current strategy is going to make and what’s potentially holding up or causing frictions or or things that aren’t quite working in order to implement that policy well.

So our session was introducing a lot of that work that we’re doing, which has just started really and Chirsty mentioned earlier action learning sets. We’re also using that method for looking, for working with local authority leads and associated stakeholders within local authorities who are dealing with the housing, the acute housing issues. And so we are starting to gather insights as to why, at local level, it’s been difficult or what’s what’s not been so difficult, what is working in terms of really making progress towards improving, particularly, issues around homelessness.

And I mean, we have to remember that most Scottish Government policy is delivered locally. In terms of housing, it’s mainly delivered by local areas and through housing associations. So it’s, delivery is really where we’re focusing. We’re also doing some work, looking at working with peer researchers who live in the communities who are the people kind of facing these issues, who often don’t get hurt as much as they need to in terms of working up solutions. Our our hope is there that we actually really learn, you know, what, what it is that they really need to see changed in order to unlock kind of the gains in their living standards and they might be different things than what politicians and officials think are the priorities.

So, the session was really setting out that work. We only have some early findings just now, but we will be doing much more activity on this as we gather more findings, so I’m sure we’ll come back and do another podcast on this at a later date.

00:19:21 Brodie Gillan

Thanks, Emma. Sounds very interesting. Now, of course, the conference wasn’t just about our own work. There was many other thought provoking sessions and discussions all around the conference. One that really stood out for me was the roundtable discussion on tax policy under the Labour Government a year into their term.

In this roundtable, there was a lot of discussion around the idea of a potential wealth tax. This was a very timely discussion as the wealth tax has been in the news a lot recently with support from some Labour MPs and former leaders and some big opposition from other politicians and even research institutes.

Emma, what did you make of that debate and specifically on the wealth tax idea and the wider discussion about Labour’s tax policy one year on?

00:20:09 Emma Congreve

Well, I’m really glad you enjoyed that roundtable, Brodie, because it was part of something I’m involved in, which is the tax and social policy group, which is a group within the Social Policy Association, and we set ourselves up a couple of years ago to really try and explore and talk more about the significant intersection, really, between tax and social policy, where tax is traditionally seen as something that economists talk about and social policy is seen as something that social policy academics talk about, and it can be difficult to sometimes bring people together to talk across those issues. And so the round table was was doing that, and it was a really good session very early on a Friday morning and yeah, so wealth tax is coming up a lot and we had a session with the social policy and tax group earlier in the year where we talked about this down at LSE, and it’s clearly an issue that a lot of people want to see some serious consideration of. As with any tax, there are trade-offs and the opposition doesn’t just come from, you know, a, people stating that they don’t believe in it or don’t think it’s a good idea.

It’s also because it can be really hard to understand how it would operate in practise and how it would really capture the group of wealth, the group of people with that wealth, that is intended. So we talked a little bit in the roundtable about some of the attempts over the last year that the UK Government have tried, for example with the increase on inheritance tax for businesses and agricultural land and clearly, you know, the intention there was to try and capture people storing excess wealth in, in, in land. But you know the main people are affected by this are people who own the land and farm it, which is the majority of people who own agricultural land in the UK. So those kinds of missteps, you would say, in terms of maybe quite how the government, the UK Government, really thought through what they were doing, had the best evidence available. We talked a little bit about the fact that they didn’t – that Defra, the Department for Agriculture in the UK Government didn’t know about the change before the Treasury announced it. So you know there’s things there that we need to learn from the past year.

We talked about all kinds of things in the session, and I was there to give a bit of the perspective from Scotland. As it turned out, the majority of the audience was also from Scotland, which doesn’t often happen at a UK event. So we talked a little bit about how difficult it can be, when the UK Government is making decisions, to understand how much Scotland has been considered.

We talked a little bit about the National Insurance rise for employers and you know the the the belief that there will be differential impacts in Scotland because we have far more sectors where we have, where labour costs are a larger share of total costs, hospitality being one key one and companies in that sector will be particularly affected.

We also talked a bit about, you know, what does it feel like this last year? Does it feel like there have been more missed opportunities than opportunities taken? And I think the consensus was, it’s felt like a bit of a a bit of a mess without a really clean narrative to underpin what it is that the Labour government is trying to achieve on tax, doing little bits here and there to try and meet fiscal rules without thinking about proper reforms that are required. We talked briefly about Council tax and non domestic rates for example. So you know those are things that really big things that do need reform, that that, in the first year maybe the political mess would have allowed the government to to do some of those reforms. But they shied away from those, so a bit disappointed, I think was the overall vibe of the session, but it it it was a good discussion.

00:24:33 Brodie Gillan

Great. Thank you. And I think we’ll definitely be keeping an eye to see how this debate continues in the future and Labour’s wider tax policy.

Chirsty, Hannah, what were the other sort of key takeaways from the conference that stuck with you?

00:24:51 Hannah Randolph

I think something that was interesting for me was, last year at this same conference, that was when the UK general election was.

And so as Emma said, the vibe was very different, because I think there was a lot of hope last year about what could be done with a new government coming in and so this year that was definitely overshadowed, particularly by the welfare reforms that Chirsty’s mentioned, where people feel like the attempt to meet fiscal rules has kind of fallen on the backs of disabled people essentially. And that vote didn’t go through, and they’re now delaying those plans or rethinking those. Itwas just, kind of, a marked different vibe from last year.

That was something that I noticed, and then I don’t want to talk too much about tax, but one of the sessions that I did really enjoy was another, another session run by the the tax and Social Policy group about social insurance, which I hadn’t had an opportunity to think about very much. But one of the nice things about conferences is getting to go to sessions about things that are not necessarily your direct area and hear other people talk about them.

And so, the session on social insurance, which is National Insurance in the UK, sort of laid out, you know, what’s the purpose of, of National Insurance and why is it different than a tax on income? So, economists tend to talk about it like it’s just part of income tax. But it is for a different purpose. It’s meant to support working people and fund pensions and that kind of thing. So I found that whole discussion really interesting and just kind of a different, different area than I usually think about.

00:26:53 Chirsty McFadyen

Yeah. For me, I’ve bookmarked two sessions that I really enjoyed in particular. One was about the work capability assessment. So Dr Annie Irvine and Cindy Leung did like a meta-synthesis of they said “17 years of a flawed policy” and discussion of what the future might hold, which was really interesting. So they kind of synthesised all the different research that’s been done on the work capability assessment in the past. Just for reference, if anyone isn’t aware of what this is, the work capability assessment is currently an assessment that you go through to determine whether you’re fit for work under Universal Credit, but through the welfare bill, this is likely going to be scrapped and they’re going to use PIP instead. The personal independence payment assessment.

But it’s kind of still up in the air, so we don’t know for sure what’s happening, but basically they were kind of reflecting on the work capability assessment as it’s probably gonna now be taken away from the process. So the main things that they were talking about was like commonly, commonly reported flaws of the system being like, burdensome, stressful, disempowering, all this kind of stuff.

And then stakes of the like the the categorising process as well. So like, the kind of, it can be quite a high stakes process for people, I guess, like whether you sort of end up being, whether you pass or fail is the way that they, they discuss it. That’s the way kind of people talk about it is like passing the work capability assessment is like you’re, you’re not able to work and failing means you have to work, kind of thing.

So, but, something that they discussed, which was really interesting was the sort of question of whether illness and disability is the most appropriate, relevant or meaningful dimension along which to assess a person’s capability for work. And so, they were thinking kind of almost hopefully, which was quite nice because as we said, there was a little bit less hope than last year.

And I found this session quite hopeful because they were thinking about, you know, because there’s big changes coming, we could potentially have like some real innovation and the way that people are assessed is capable for work and the way that benefits are done. So that was really cool. And then another one that was super interesting was one from Dr Clementine Hill O’Connor, who talked about lived experience in Scottish policy making.

And so lived experience is like, a huge buzzword in policymaking at the moment. Lots and lots of people are kind of latching onto it as like the most important thing. And while it is super necessary, what Dr Hill O’Connor’s thoughts were was sort of, are we going about this ethically? And what’s the, kind of, like, the rigour and like, quality assurance process around lived experience evidence, because like, she was basically talking about how qualitative research can really, kind of, give you similar findings, but in a very robust way, there’s a lot of kind of rigour around qualitative methods that can be used to sort of ensure that things are, you know, not necessarily like generally, like, generalizable, but have a really good kind of like in, level of saturation where you feel like you’re not getting new themes coming up and there’s kind of like a good coverage whereas lived experience and the way that it’s used in Parliament can sometimes just be one person having a chance to speak. And that’s just one experience. So she was talking about the kind of pros and cons of that and how it can kind of be sort of put on a pedestal. But there needs to really be, like, thought about how it’s done to ensure robustness and rigour. But also, like, there needs to be more thought around the ethics of it because there are people kind of effectively being wheeled out to share their stories sometimes like and that’s, you know, can be difficult and a lot of parliamentary processes can be like, public and even televised. So yeah, it was a cool session to kind of, think about like that, that word lived experience and kind of what it means to people in the parliamentary space.

And kind of how we ensure that that’s done in a way that’s like, fair, but also kind of, prioritises like, good research happening as well.

00:31:00 Brodie Gillan

Thank you guys for covering that, and selfishly, thank you for covering some of the sessions that I missed. I feel like I’ve had a bit of a crash course in it all again.

00:31:07 Chirsty McFadyen

All again, yeah, I guess more widely something we all really enjoyed as well was the fact that like York is a campus university. Weirdly, they’re famous for their geese. There’s like loads of like, Canada geese hanging about on the campus, so that was really fun. We managed to see a little bit of the city as well, which was nice.

So yeah, a really cool place to go. And I think overall, just like it being an international conference was really cool as well, like the fact that there were so many people from like various East Asian countries, like, there was a lot of things that I’d never heard about and it was, as Brodie said earlier, like, really cool to have that kind of comparative lens on the research. So it was definitely cool for that to happen and hopefully they’ll do it again soon.

00:31:53 Brodie Gillan

Yeah, I definitely agree with that, Chirsty. And a big thank you to everyone at the SPA conference who organised and had us along. It was fantastic conference. I think, all in all, it was a really great, timely reminder of just how connected economic and social policy really are and whether we’re looking at like, work, health, housing, tax. None of these issues, they really don’t exist in silos.

And as we continue to think about how we’re going to tackle some of these really big challenges facing Scotland, the UK and globally, these kind of like interdisciplinary conversations and international conversations are more important than ever.

So a big thank you to Emma, Hannah and Chirsty for joining me today. And a big thank you for tuning in. If you want to hear more about any of the work we’ve mentioned, please check out the show notes or the Fraser of Allander Institute website. As always, if you’ve got any questions or topics you’d like us to cover in a future episode, please do get in touch. Until next time, thank you for listening.