Building brighter financial futures for all
Professor Andy Lymer
As Director of the Centre for Personal Financial Wellbeing (CPFW), Professor Andy Lymer is shining a light on how individuals and households manage their money. His research is helping people do more with what they’ve got – and lead happier lives as a result.
“I felt quite strongly that there wasn’t enough research going into this issue that affects everybody: your relationship with money, how your household thinks about money, how you plan for something that will allow your life to flourish – all key issues we ignore at our peril.”
Andy’s work has taken him from leading the Tax Development Programme at HM Treasury to evaluating groundbreaking national savings schemes for low-income families. He has now found a natural home for his work in setting up and leading Aston University’s Centre for Personal Financial Wellbeing (CPFW) – an interdisciplinary environment that connects academia, public, charity and private sectors of the economy targeting both policy change and practice development.
Poor personal money management costs the UK billions and puts enormous pressure on public services. While policy measures have been often been reactive, Andy and his team at CPFW focus on tackling root causes, designing tools and frameworks to help people take control of their finances.
CPFW has delivered projects including working with Aston partner Birmingham City Council to transform support for their tenants to address gambling harms, and a major study spotlighting the challenges faced by those on irregular incomes. Their vision is always to provide practical, timely insights that support improved financial wellbeing for all.
“We live in the moment, and that’s the right way to enjoy life to the fullest. But you also need to be thinking about how to prepare as best you can for the future, because the more you save and invest early, the more you’ll have later. It is all about a balance of enjoying the now, whilst being mindful of the future.”
Transforming frontline support for harmful gambling
In 2021, Andy and his team started a two-year project with Birmingham City Council to tackle the relationship between harmful gambling and tenancy loss in the city. Working with the council’s housing and lettings teams, they surveyed 57,000 tenants to understand the scale of harms linked to gambling. They then worked with the council to devise methods of identifying those in need at an earlier stage and signposting them to relevant support. This work is reducing evictions for council-owned properties – helping people to stay in their homes when they might otherwise have lost hem.
As Andy explains, this can be trickier than it might first appear: “Gambling is a stigmatised activity that people don’t like to talk about. We had to find a way to help council staff to raise these issues with tenants both sensitively and appropriately, discern the level of challenge faced, and then provide better information and support at an earlier stage.”
This project’s findings have resulted in the council changing their frontline systems to directly look for gambling as a potential factor when tenants present with crisis needs. As a direct result, they are now referring more people for support and helping to keep more people in their homes.
“A lot of our work has direct practical implications. The ability to be able to make a change is a key motivation for our work.”
Influencing UK financial policy
By providing evidence-based insights into how people spend, borrow and save money, Andy and his team are helping shape government policy and making a real difference in people’s lives.
CPFW’s partnership with the Money and Pensions Service (MaPS) is a key channel for this work. MaPS is a government body, part of the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), that looks after financial wellbeing strategy for the UK. The service co-hosts the CPFW’s annual conference and works closely with the Centre as they seek to ensure policies and interventions are serving the needs of the country. Andy’s work on understanding barriers to accessing personal financial planning advice has informed MaPS's strategy to develop more accessible and effective financial guidance services. More recently, commissions for CPFW on the connections between physical, mental and financial health is helping MaPS integrate financial wellbeing support into the UK’s health and care systems.
Andy and his team have also been working closely with district councils across Worcestershire to help them improve their poverty alleviation strategies – work that potentially affects 650,000 people. The pandemic revolutionised the way money was distributed for crisis support – this work explores how we can incorporate these lessons into future fund allocation, encouraging more trust, coordination and collaboration between stakeholders. This work is being rolled out to more local authorities around the country.
Andy is also working with councils to help them prepare for the government’s recently announced plan to move from 6- and 12-month household support to a 3-year Crisis and Resilience Fund (CRF). He is hopeful this will do even more to promote longer-term thinking when it comes to debt management – allowing challenges to be increasingly tackled at the source.
“Short term thinking means you’re always solving the crisis, rather than preventing it. This is an amazing opportunity to move away from the ‘patching it up’ mindset to actually solving the underlying problems that cause personal financial crises.”
Impact snapshot
“The CPFW team’s work has been transformative in shaping our post-Covid partnership approach to tackling poverty. Their insight, reflected in the way we allocated the Household Support Fund and in their powerful framing of poverty as a ‘wicked problem’, has helped us better understand the challenges our residents face and how we can stand alongside them. We are truly grateful for their continued dedication as we move into the CRF era, determined to ensure that every pound reaches the people who need it most and creates real, lasting impact in our communities.”
Amanda Smith, Director of Communities, Malvern Hills District Council
