BACKGROUND

There is a great deal of evidence that inequalities (i.e. an absence of fairness, given that most inequalities in the UK today are arguably ‘unfair’) are damaging our society, economy, environment and democracy. In fact, their consequences are so severe that it is impossible to make real and sustained progress on political priorities such as boosting economic growth without substantially reducing those inequalities. An unfair society and economy is not only morally wrong - it’s also bad for everyone. But politicians of all parties have spent years misdiagnosing the problems, and so have simply addressed the symptoms rather than tackling the underlying causes.

AIMS

HIDDEN WIRING is a planned online resource that will show how each of these issues links together – the correlational and causal relationships at play – by highlighting published research that provides the evidence base for each of these relationships in the UK, such as the evidence that poverty and inequality contributes to economic stagnation. It will crowdsource links to existing academic and other research from experts in each area, to produce a searchable online database of evidence for the relationships between 14 issues. It is designed to help anyone with an interest in making more progress on UK policy priorities, such as parliamentarians, civil servants, journalists, researchers, campaigners and business leaders, by showing them which underlying issues need to be tackled in order to unlock deep-rooted and sustainable change.

HOW IT WORKS

HIDDEN WIRING is in development and will be formally launched once enough evidence has been added to it through crowdsourcing (hopefully in early 2024). It will be kept up to date as a living resource. It will include academic research and ‘grey literature’. It will show which research mentions solutions and/or public attitudes alongside evidence of causal or correlational links between issues (i.e. problems). Crowdsourced submissions will be subject to a rigorous quality control process.

HOW TO CONTRIBUTE

Please help us to build up this resource! We are populating the database through a large crowdsourcing initiative involving academic and policy experts from a broad range of institutions and specialisms. You can upload evidence at the link below; it only takes a few minutes to submit a piece of evidence, and you can submit as many as you like, including your own work as well as work by others. Thank you!

Contribute evidence

THE ISSUES

The issues have been selected on the basis that they are priorities identified by one or both of the two main political parties, and/or are high salience issues with the public based on regular polling ‘issue trackers’.

Issues appear in at least one of the following four sources: Ipsos UK issues index, YouGov issues tracker, Rishi Sunak’s five priorities, and Keir Starmer’s five missions.

Mouse over an issue to see the highlighted relationships. This diagram is provisional and will be updated once more evidence has been shared. The positions of issues on the diagram are arbitrary.