Transforming EDI practices in UK insurance

This study was carried out by experts at the University of Nottingham, in partnership with Browne Jacobson LLP.

It is the first independent study of its kind into people’s lived experiences of EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) in UK insurance firms. It will now be used as an industry-wide benchmark for assessing and improving workplace culture.

The research was led by Louise Mullany (Professor of Sociolinguistics) and Dr Victoria Howard (Diversity and Inclusion Specialist) at the University of Nottingham. It was conducted as part of the university’s Inclusive Financial Services Hub, INFINITY, and an Innovate UK Knowledge Transfer Partnership.

Research findings

The study uncovered unconscious affinity bias, with several participants noting a tendency for firms to recruit and promote those with whom they share common characteristics, backgrounds or personal connections.

Although the study focused on UK insurance firms, its findings are relevant to wider financial services, as well as a range of other workplaces in the UK and overseas.

See the full PDF report

Is that plain English?

Our team of world-class researchers, led by Professor Kathy Conklin at the University of Nottingham, have been working with firms to provide readability analysis. This was completed through questionnaires and eye-tracking, to explore how various segments of the population read legal documents.

Regulations often require that ‘Terms and Conditions’ be understood by consumers. However, there is little empirical evidence underpinning decisions about whether contracts can be understood or not.

The researchers evaluate the accessibility of essential written material (for example, terms and conditions, insurance policies, eviction notices, responses to medical complaints) for people from diverse backgrounds and education levels using standardised measures of reading difficulty, eye-tracking when reading, and comprehension questions.

Research findings

The work has demonstrated that, “a large proportion (approximately 87%) of the UK adult population struggles to read and understand insurance policy documents, and the resultant need for clearer policy wording in the insurance market to protect these vulnerable individuals”.

Levelling up: Designing policy to fit places

The UK’s growth and productivity challenge has a highly uneven and longstanding local geography. The UK boasts some of Europe’s highest productivity and innovation concentration localities in Europe, but also localities suffering entrenched deprivation.

As the government introduces new policies aiming to level up the UK, such as the Towns Fund, Levelling Up Fund, and place-based interventions such as Freeports, and new devolution deals, good policy design requires an up-to-date understanding of the economic geography of the UK.

Policymakers face choices over the level of geographic intervention, from devolved nations, to regions, to lower geographies; and choices over how to group geographies together as recipients of common interventions. The right understanding of the UK’s current economic geography requires an up-to-date view of the experience of places in the post-pandemic era.

In this report, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, we partnered with Experian, Fable Data and Huq Industries, providers of real-time economic data on places, to produce a machine-learned statistical model of the economic geography of the UK. Our data allow us to measure consumer spending, consumer mobility, consumer and business financial distress, and business expectations in close to real-time for lower-level geographies.

Research findings

Our research shows that economically similar places at the local authority level, are spread geographically across the regions. This suggests that policy interventions need to be targeted at the local rather than regional level.

View the research (PDF)

How do individuals repay their debt? A credit card study

We study how individuals repay their debt using linked data on multiple credit cards.

Repayments are not allocated to the higher interest rate card, which would minimize the cost of borrowing. Moreover, the degree of misallocation is invariant to the economic stakes, which is inconsistent with optimization frictions.

Instead, we show that repayments are consistent with a balance-matching heuristic under which the share of repayments on each card is matched to the share of balances on each card.

Balance matching captures more than half of the predictable variation in repayments and is highly persistent within individuals over time.

Publication: Published in American Economic Review.

View the research