One Year On

Building back better: Rethinking urban futures with children and young people 

Deborah Ralls

Originally Published 27 October 2020

Building back better has its roots in disaster recovery. It advocates a determination to do things differently, to avoid a return to ‘business as usual’ and to focus instead on models of long-term economic and community resilience that prioritise wellbeing and inclusiveness.

Building solid foundations through active citizenship

It has long been acknowledged that we live in a rapidly changing world, but COVID-19 has accelerated this change and presented accompanying challenges that are beyond our imaginations. Yet the pandemic has also given rise to hope that societies can use the current situation as a catalyst for change for a more inclusive, socially just society.

Building back better for economic and community resilience requires a solid foundation that can futureproof inclusive towns and cities and improve citizens’ wellbeing. There is an increasing recognition that our understanding of the socio-economic functioning of society, and the active role that we can play in it, is shaped from childhood. However, particularly in the current climate, CYP’s fundamental right to participate in the matters that affect them is often overlooked. We need initiatives that can support young people’s efforts to safely and effectively act as agents of change beyond the pandemic, to actively participate in shaping responses, and to be meaningfully included in all aspects and phases of the response as existing, active citizens. It is clear then, that as societies everywhere undergo transformation, if we are to build back better, approaches to education must also change.

Experts are warning of the catastrophic and long-lasting impact of the loss of economic and social opportunities for young people as a direct result of policy choices made during the pandemic: “We’re talking about this generation not being able to contribute to a well-functioning economy … The implications couldn’t be more far-reaching for us all.” COVID-19 has brought into sharp relief that governments need to do more than deal with immediate threats; they must actively plan for our shared futures.

Engaging our youngest citizens as active partners in urban policymaking decisions and taking their opinions and concerns seriously, can contribute to individual wellbeing and self-esteem whilst also building a shared, intergenerational awareness of urban challenges and possibilities.

A rapidly changing world requires new approaches to urban education policy that are about more than classroom-based learning and a focus on individual academic achievement. Now, more than ever, it is vital that we remember that education is at the heart of both personal and community development. There is a need for education policy to focus on learning environments and on new approaches to learning for greater justice, social equity and global solidarity.

The city/town is a classroom

A large number of urban places are deliberately choosing to change the way they view education by identifying and developing a myriad of learning opportunities available beyond the school gates. Such an approach eliminates the limitations of learning within the school, turning the town or city itself into a classroom with a rich, diverse curriculum – a place of possibility to be explored by CYP.

It is vital that a wide range of CYP from all areas can regularly contribute to policies to improve their town or city. However, building back better requires CYP and policymakers to develop mutual knowledge, dialogue and joint ways of working  where CYP must be considered as the experts in their own lives.

In order to address these issues, urban education policy can set out to develop a curriculum that is ‘more than school’, offering CYP regular, ongoing opportunities to ‘learn to do’ urban decision-making and to work collaboratively to build back better with a range of people from outside their local neighbourhood. Education policy needs to be redefined to generate collaborative learning opportunities where i) children and young people develop their knowledge related to urban decision-making processes and ii) policymakers learn about young people’s wide range of lived experiences, gaining an insight into young citizens’ hopes, fears and areas of expertise. 

Learning to live and do together: building back better

Education is fundamental to any collective attempt by towns and cities to build back better for the common good. CYP have the right to a broad and varied education that encourages respect for their own and other cultures, and the environment. That right should start with the close-at-hand world of their hometown or city, via an approach to education policy that helps today’s CYP build the relationships, skills and knowledge they need to be active citizens and urban decision-makers.

One way of starting a collective approach to urban education would be through increasing awareness of the varied day-to-day lives of CYP through the development of urban learning labs. Labs located across diverse urban communities can be used to bring together CYP and urban policymakers from different areas to develop shared ideas for an inclusive town/city. These spaces give CYP a place to express their views in a variety of ways of their choice, offer CYP freedom of expression and the right to participate in the matters that affect them so that they can contribute collectively to improving policies for the benefit of all citizens.

In order to futureproof an inclusive town or city, urban education policy needs to improve participatory processes based on co-responsibility and active citizenship. It is essential for both CYP and policymakers to experience and understand the town/city in its many dimensions. To build back better we need to give CYP the ‘Right to the Town/City’, a form of urban apprenticeship beyond the school. Such an apprenticeship would position CYP as urban experts, who teach other CYP and adult professionals about the area where they live, its challenges and possibilities. Learning would give CYP and policymakers the opportunity to learn from others about lived realities in different areas, so as to better understand the town or city in all its diversity. Such participatory processes enable a shared understanding of what it means to build back better, developing co-responsibility for rethinking urban futures – with, not for, our children and young people.

How to support refugees and asylum seekers' health and wellbeing 

Jo Biglin

Originally published 10 August 2020

It’s nothing new to point out that local authorities across the country are struggling to support refugees and asylum seekers. Dispersal policies see asylum seekers disproportionately housed in some of Britain’s most deprived areas, and local authorities receive no extra funding to cope with supporting them. Greater Manchester consists of some of the most deprived areas in the UK, yet the region has some of the UK’s largest populations of dispersed asylum seekers. In 2018 Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester, wrote to the Home Office urging it to reconsider its dispersal policies, as a result of pressure from local councils to express the mounting struggle relating to shortages in resources that was – and still is – affecting regions across the North.

The Home Office has shown no sign of revaluating its position on the dispersal system. Consequently, local authorities continue to struggle to support refugees and asylum seekers. Exacerbating this are ongoing increases in restrictive policies relating to asylum seekers’ access to welfare and services such as education and the NHS. Furthermore, cuts are being made to integration and enrichment programs; for example, free English as a Second or Foreign Language classes are no longer funded by the government.

Mental and physical wellbeing

Refugees often experience a range of mental health issues, resulting from the trauma of displacement and events that led up to displacement, and these can be compounded by new experiences within the UK. Refugee and asylum seekers experience a number of barriers to mainstream health care, including the dispersal systems moving them throughout the country, and a lack of awareness of entitlement. Therefore, the importance of understanding places of restoration and healing for refugees and asylum seekers is imperative to the improvement of government policies concerned with such issues.

My research focused on an urban allotment run by a charity in Manchester that aims to provide practical, emotional, and social support and advocacy for refugees and asylum seekers. Findings suggested that the wellbeing of the participants was improved by attending the allotment because it alleviated feelings of social isolation and loneliness. It was somewhere to engage in familiar and pleasurable activities and positive nostalgia – as many refugees come from agrarian backgrounds – and was a place to keep physically active and busy, given people seeking asylum are not permitted to work. Finally, the act of nurturing a plant to bearing fruit acted as a metaphor to nurture the self and others.

A new policy response at the local and national levels

This research highlighted how this urban green space had a significant impact on the health and wellbeing of refugees and asylum seekers. In the wake of continuing restrictions on asylum seekers’ access to welfare and services, new worries about the potential impact of a no-deal Brexit on funding, and the impact of COVID-19 on local authority budgets, it is easy to see how local authorities might struggle to prioritise something like developing an allotment project over more basic support systems.

While understandable, improving the health and wellbeing of vulnerable people can happen if decision-makers, authorities, and politicians involved with and responsible for the design, planning, development and maintenance of urban green space can work with what Manchester already has – green space. Manchester has a comprehensive green and blue infrastructure strategy and action plan from 2015 – 2025 that recognised the importance of urban green space for the development of the city. The plan recognises where urban green space had the potential to have a positive impact on the city, from the large scale, such as economic growth and investment, to the local level of improving communities’ health and wellbeing. Overall the aim is that ‘by 2025 high quality, well maintained green and blue spaces will be an integral part of all neighbourhoods’. While the plan does include some discussion of community growing spaces, there is no mention of how these, or any sort of green space, can be targeted at specific marginalised groups.

This is unfortunate, as in addition to the discussion presented here on the impact on refugee and asylum seeker populations, there is also evidence of the role growing space can play in improving the lives of other marginalised groups such as people suffering with mental health illnesses and adults with learning disabilities. What’s more, there is also discussion of the positive impact school and community grow gardens can have on children from all backgrounds, but particularly those from deprived backgrounds.

On a national level, the research I have conducted demonstrates how important it is for policymakers to recognise the value in enrichment projects such as an allotment, with the ultimate goal of attaining adequate funding for local authorities and charities so that they are able to provide these services.

More specific policy asks include legislating for a minimum area of open and accessible green space per thousand people, and for councils to be required to provide free community growing spaces. Allotments have extensive legal protection and it is a legal requirement that they are provided by councils. However, this legislation is insufficient to cover the importance of allotments tending to asylum seekers and refugees. Despite the legal requirement to this, there are extensive waiting listings for access to an allotment plot; a report in 2010 estimated a waiting list of around 40 years in some areas. Furthermore, there is a cost associated with renting a plot, reducing the accessibility for many marginalised groups.

Community gardens are not protected by statutory law. Therefore, legislation is needed to protect community gardens/allotments, alongside legal requirements for councils to provide free, open, and easily accessible community growing spaces. Additionally, councils must be required to demonstrate that they are targeting specific user groups and educating them on the benefits of using green space and community gardens and encouraging these groups to use such facilities.

COVID-19 has flung into focus the importance of green and outdoor space to partake in physically distanced exercise, and in doing so, has exposed further inequalities within our society. Those living in small flats in deprived urban tower blocks, with no access to private gardens, also had poor public green space provision. Given the known benefits of outdoor/green space to our mental as well as physical wellbeing, this is something that will lead to health inequalities. The original COVID-19 lockdown guidelines permitted time in an allotment as a form of exercise, with members of the same household, and where physical distancing was possible. Thus, legislation to provide and protect community gardens/allotments could have had a significant impact on the health and wellbeing of marginalised communities in unprecedented times of need.

Follow the Science

Martin Yuille and Professor Emeritus Bill Oliver

Originally published 23 June 2020

After the pandemic, which window of opportunity will open widest for far-reaching innovation and experimentation in public policy reform? If there is one window that cannot be shut back down, it surely relates to public policy in the field of health.

We distinguish ‘health’ from ‘healthcare’; health is a state we all wish to have, while healthcare is an intervention we all wish will end as quickly as possible.

Post-COVID-19, it will not be simply a matter of improvements to stockpiling of PPE, increased provision of ventilators or intensive care beds, or capacity for population-wide testing or large-scale contact tracing. There are deeper issues at play, going right back to basic definitions of ‘health’.

This broader issue of health has to be tackled afresh, because what makes COVID-19 such a problem is that, while it is a mild disease for those who are otherwise healthy, it becomes a killer disease for those with underlying conditions. This is also frequently the case with other respiratory infections like influenza. Continuously improving population health by tackling those underlying conditions is the best defence there can be against the next viral pandemic. That is what public policy now has to put right.

The underlying conditions that make COVID-19 into a killer disease are themselves pandemics. They include chronic conditions like diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Prevention does not mean improving treatment of these conditions, but reducing the risks that we all face of getting them. Those risks are well-known: obesity, for example, was identified by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a global pandemic years before COVID-19 came along. It affects not only high income but also middle- and low -income countries. In North Korea, obesity (BMI over 30) affects 6.8% of adults. The WHO has coined the term ‘globesity’ to refer to the problem.

If we ‘follow the science’, then continuous improvement of population health requires us to think again about how public policy can be used to combat obesity, insufficient physical exercise, and social isolation. Public policy has, so far, failed. Healthcare policy is not the issue in the first instance. By the time we need healthcare, we have missed the opportunity to prevent ill-health. The direct issues relate to food and agriculture policies; transport, housing and planning policies; and cultural and community policies. The indirect issues include education policies, economic and business policies, and even foreign policy (think of chlorinated chicken or hormone-enriched beef).

Improving population health as a goal in itself and as protection against the next new viral epidemic thus encompasses public policy as a whole, if we are to follow the science. WHO has expressed the need for ‘health in all policies’ so as to fight against common chronic conditions. This would put health on the agenda of every department of national and local government.

However, this does not go far enough. Health should not merely be on the agenda. It has to become the agenda itself. In other words, health has to become the purpose, the organising principle, the raison d’être of government and of governance. If we do not follow the science, we will be left with the consequences of ever-increasing levels of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, depression and anxiety. Much of the £152.9 billion needed in 2018/19 by the NHS goes on treating these conditions. Then there are the non-NHS costs of the consequences of this ill-health. Public Health England has calculated that the financial costs to individuals, employers, the NHS, the government, and to the whole English economy to be between £147 billion and £185 billion per annum. This corresponds to about 11% of GDP for the UK as a whole. Despite all this cost, without change, we shall still be left at the mercy of the next pandemic.

Government change

Health is not the ‘absence of disease’: we endorse the argument that it should be defined as the status we each have when our needs are optimally satisfied.

Applying this definition in policy reform, a Deputy Prime Minister (DPM) should have direct responsibility for population health and should have the role of coordinating action on health across all departments. The Department of Health becomes the Department of Healthcare. MHCLG seeks optimal housing provision. BEIS ensures that employers provide optimal rest and exercise for employees – as well as safety at work. And so on.

Part of the DPM’s coordination can be delivered via the National Risk Register that was introduced in 2008 to list, monitor and mitigate significant risks. Flu is on the register. So are emergent infectious diseases. But obesity, for example, is not – despite the recommendation of the Chief Medical Officer. All the modifiable risk factors for the common long-term conditions need to be on the national and community level risk registers. The register is a good tool for defending communities from floods. It needs to defend them also from the pandemic in chronic conditions. Of course, this requires a government that takes risk reduction seriously. The recent depletion of national PPE stockpiles indicates that this cannot be taken for granted.

In addition to such institutional changes in our governance, we also need community and technological change.

Community change

Britain’s first-ever Public Health Minister, Tessa Jowell, laid out a vision in 1998 for improving the health of the population that saw stakeholders – including communities – agreeing to work together. Moving from vision to practise is never easy, and the first major attempt at improving population health in 2008 relied not on stakeholder agreements, but on a conventional service approach, with the introduction of the NHS Health Check.

This service has persisted for over a decade but is at risk of becoming solely triage for patients. However, it can still provide a platform for reforms that would promote the health of the population via stakeholder agreements and that would elevate individuals and communities from passive recipients of a service into citizens and organisations who are engaged and involved in their own health and that of others.

One idea is to convert the typical practise nurse who performs health checks into someone who also undertakes community development work. Citizens coming in for checks would be encouraged not only to improve their own health but also to work for their community on such goals. Some citizens would then become health champions. The rapid recruitment of 750,000 volunteer champions of the NHS at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic suggests that there are many people who would want actively to aid their fellow citizens’ in preventing disease.

Imagine health champions (recruited at an NHS Health Check and supported by the nurse/community development worker) who are members of football fan clubs. They might undertake to improve their fitness and lose weight alongside their fellow fans at the club (regardless of whether they have had a health check). The club is encouraged to support this because the fans want to bring their families and friends along too. Thus, the health check has become a tool simultaneously for improving health, for community development, and for building a local business.

Technological change

The technical business of health improvement is ‘risk reduction’. This means I need to know, as quickly and as precisely as possible, that I am being successful in minimising my risk factors for the common long-term conditions. I need regular testing of my ‘risk biomarkers’ with my test results stored safely. These risk biomarkers are simply molecules in our bodies where a change in structure or concentration is robustly associated with decreasing risk of, say, diabetes.

Little research has been done on such risk biomarkers because work on prevention has been so feeble. However, with the right prevention infrastructure in place, the innovation required should be quick and straightforward. Unsurprisingly, this infrastructure is precisely what is needed to prevent a disaster when the next pandemic strikes. It comprises a national health data management system comparable to what was being built up until 2010 by the NHS Connecting for Health project, plus a biobanking system comparable – but larger – than the UK Biobank project started in 2005.

Nearly all governments around the world have decided that they need to say that they are following the science in dealing with COVID-19. From the point of view of the way that public policy rationales change over time, the new reliance on evidence makes a welcome change from reliance on either dogma or fantasy. The challenge for public policy thinkers will often be a need for them to brush up on their knowledge of areas of science that are key to public policy, areas such as epidemiology.

The Health and Social Care system under strain: Rethinking integration policies in the post Covid-19 era

Marcello Morciano, Kath Checkland, Matt Sutton, Jonathan Stokes 

Originally published 1 July 2020

In 2019, the NHS published plans (‘The NHS Long Term Plan’) promising to introduce inventive, ambitious ways to bring NHS and social care together across England, working with the private and voluntary sector, and users and carers. Needless to say, things have changed since 2019.

Nevertheless, the recent COVID-19 pandemic is showing us just how important it is to have joined-up health and care services, especially for caring for vulnerable people like the elderly in care homes. If anything, there has been a renewed urgency to roll out ‘integrated care’ initiatives.

However, there is also the risk of acting too rapidly without a clear direction. In fact, we do not know yet the best way of integrating services or what factors lead to successful integration. There is no detailed review of locally implemented integration policies to enable stakeholders to compare them and share learning on best practices. We need this to understand what works best and why, to identify areas for improvement and encourage good and sustainable practice nationally.

In a paper, published (Open Access) in the journal Health Policy, we have conducted the first independent national evaluation of the main ‘Vanguard’ integrated care prototypes trialled by NHS England from 2015-2018. This was a massive programme, costing about £389 million and covering a population of around 5 million people (around 9% of the population of England).

The declared aspiration of the Vanguard programme was the development of `locally driven’ prototypes, which, if successful, could be rapidly spread across England. We summarise our analysis and findings below, which provides some preliminary evidence that can help policymakers choose their integrated care direction in this turbulent time.

The NHS Vanguard integrated care models

Fifty local areas were selected across England to act as Vanguards. Some Vanguards focused upon improving the integration between primary, secondary, community and social care, with the aspiration to provide more integrated care in the community. These included 23 sites who developed “population-based” flexible models to be adapted to the needs of their whole local population (known to policymakers as either ‘MCPs’ or ‘PACS’) and others focused specifically on care home residents, mainly older people (six sites, referred to as ECHs).

There was little instruction or advice as to what should be trialled within each model, beyond the populations outlined above. They generally aimed to improve care, but the official main aspiration was to reduce hospital admissions.

What we found

The easiest way is to visualise this. The figure below shows that there are parallel trends on the outcomes prior to the intervention being introduced (before the vertical grey line). In fact, non-Vanguard sites were doing consistently better on each measure (fewer emergency admissions and bed days), and there was an increasing trend of emergency admissions across the board.

What is also clear from below is that, in the post-intervention period, especially in the final year of the Vanguard programme, the Vanguard sites were resistant to a national trend of increasing emergency admissions. The sites that implemented integrated care aimed specifically at care homes did the best in this respect, starting with a worse rate of emergency admissions prior to the intervention and finishing better than the population-based Vanguards.

On the other hand, there was very little change in the bed days outcome, trends remain parallel throughout the post-intervention period.

Using a robust difference-in-difference statistical approach, we estimated that over the three-year period of the Vanguard programme, care home sites experienced an overall significant net reduction in emergency admissions of about 4.2% relative to the non-Vanguards. The net reduction in emergency admissions occurred mainly in the third year following implementation (-6.5%).

There was a reduction in emergency admission in sites involved in “population-based” models (MCP/PACS) too, but the effect was found to be statistically significant only in the third and final year of the programme (-3.1%).

We did not find any significant effect on total bed-days.

The take-away message

National and international experiences have shown that arranging an efficient integrated health and care system is not straightforward. The positive finding we have shown, is that integrated care has some potential to change desired outcomes, especially by targeting vulnerable groups in care homes that are a priority.

But, it is important to consider these were modest relative reductions in emergency admissions. Moreover, our results clearly show no net changes in the first year and relative reductions in emergency admissions only became significant after three years. This suggests that, even in a relatively straightforward organisational context such as care homes, where initiatives can be applied to whole resident population, achieving desired results takes time.

Finally, the modest net reduction in emergency admissions we have documented was achieved with the help of considerable additional funding and a dedicated support programme for Vanguard sites. It remains to be seen what can be achieved in a different environment. Three important lessons to be taken into account when re-shaping the system for the post-COVID-19 era.

Tackling the twin crises of COVID-19 and climate change

Alice Larkin

Originally published 16 November 2020

We’ve learnt two important lessons so far from the pandemic. The first is that our priorities can shift dramatically to tackle an emergency. The second is that change can take place quickly.

I’d like to share how these observations can be harnessed to tackle the climate emergency because, with everything going on in the world right now, you’d be forgiven for forgetting that we’re in one.

I’ve spent the last 18 years trying to understand the scale of the climate emergency and how our energy systems should transform to minimise carbon emissions. ‘Energy systems’ can sound rather technical but what I mean is how you and I use energy every day. What we use it for, when we use it, how much we use and where it comes from.

The climate emergency we’re facing is so great that mitigating the damage we are doing now, and the damage that will be done in future, requires much more than just increasing the amount of renewable electricity on our National Grid. We need to consider all the ways that we consume energy: from travelling to heating our homes, cooking to the industrial manufacture of goods; and critically, we need to do this quickly.

This is why it’s not just about technology. We know that a wide variety of technical solutions exist for cutting CO₂ emissions, but some will take decades to be sufficiently widespread to make the difference that is actually needed in the next five or ten years. Coming from an physical sciences background and spending most of my career working with engineers and social scientists, I know that modelling theoretically how an idealised technology such as Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage might cut CO₂, is very different to the more complicated process of widescale and rapid infrastructure deployment. I’m thinking of things like the construction of new nuclear power stations; retrofitting alternative technologies for heating every single UK home; designing and deploying an extensive network of electric vehicles charging points; and perhaps most importantly in the current debate – the large scale roll-out of new CO₂ removal technologies.

That’s why it matters how much energy we consume. If we can consume less, then we won’t need to transform as much high carbon infrastructure – but this is rarely the focus of CO₂ mitigation discussions.

Consuming less energy has previously taken a back seat in the policy debates to decarbonising our energy supply. One of the reasons for this is that it requires changes to individual and collective behaviour, attitudes and expectations; aspects that are seemingly more politically sensitive than a shift in technology.

For example, I’ve worked for years on cutting the CO₂ from air travel but the appetite for reducing flights, or even just curbing growth rates, has been minimal despite the widespread understanding that decarbonising aviation will take longer than the time we have to meet our Paris Climate Agreement objectives.

Yet consumption shifts can be implemented now. For example, research from The University of Manchester in June of this year analysed shipping emissions and the impact policy interventions could have when applied to existing vessels. Our research revealed that without making changes to energy consumption now, by adopting slower speeds or retrofitting ships with energy saving measures such as modern sails, the shipping sector will be unable to meet Paris targets, even assuming new vessels are able to run on zero-carbon fuels from 2030. Essentially, our research showed that it is vital to apply measures to decarbonise shipping within existing infrastructures to achieve milestone reductions while, simultaneously, developing new transformative technologies.

So, with just under twelve months until COP26 begins, what have we learnt from our response to COVID-19 to inform how we can respond to the climate change crisis? How can we equip our Government to deliver the UK’s defining action on climate change?

We’ve learnt that people can work and live differently. We can accept less commuting, less flying, less buying material goods; all energy consuming activities. We’ve accepted these changes because we know that there is a threat to human society.

We now need to apply that learning to our twin crises. Lockdown has shown that when leaders unite in recognition of a shared crisis, we adapt. This indicates that if the same leadership approach was taken to the climate emergency, we would accept changes that specifically reduce energy consumption, and supports the huge investment required in low-carbon infrastructure.

We’ve also learnt that we need more than a temporary change in our levels of energy consumption to combat climate change. Analysis of global emissions during the spring lockdowns reveals an average global reduction of 17%. However, this analysis also shows that even if some restrictions remain in place to the end of 2020, as they are likely to, the overall reduction will be much less. This indicates that while our lives were temporarily transformed, our reliance on fossil fuels remains. To ‘build back better’ we need structural and societal change that is sustained, far-reaching, and increased to meaningfully tackle the climate emergency.

To achieve this, we need significant investment. This brings me to a third matter we’ve learnt: we know that when the crisis is big enough, investment can be found. We now need investment to reflect the scale of the climate crisis. We need decision makers to direct investment, that we know can be made available, to drive rapid and radical regional and national interventions.

Clever investment now, at this crucial pivot point that has been brought about not only by COVID-19, but also the underlying attention on the climate emergency from the climate movement,  could positively transform systems and society away from fossil fuels, whilst simultaneously improving employment, equality and human well-being. To support climate change goals we will need to retrofit our entire housing stock which in turn helps to address fuel poverty, re-purpose our roads for cycling and walking – improving our air quality, and accelerate our renewable energy roll-out. All these green projects create more jobs, while delivering short term returns for society that avoid long-term damage that will come at a high cost.

Now is the time to ‘green’ society and pursue a future that considers local prosperity, jobs, resilience and equality as we reassemble our daily lives.

Not only has COVID-19 given us lessons that we can learn from, but it has also created a flux in our everyday routines. We need decision makers to take advantage of this flux to develop policies that can lead to sustained but acceptable reductions in energy consumption – focusing on delivering change in the near term.

If we don’t take advantage of this moment in time where we have demonstrated that society can accept deep change, then we will pass up our opportunity of a lifetime to help future generations.

COVID-19 and sustainable everyday routines 

Claire Hoolohan

Originally published 1 October 2020

When a practice becomes ‘locked-in’, it means that people’s capacity to act in different ways is limited, despite perhaps understanding the implications of their actions and even hen supportive of change. Often, the cultural and material conditions in which routines are situated are satisfactory, which leads to little critical reflection. The more people that participate in unsustainable practices, and the more regularly they do so, the stronger the lock-in effect becomes.

In contrast, COVID-19 has caused unprecedented disruption to everyday life, prompting a period of forced experimentation as people in all kinds of different situations adjust to new ways of living. The changes have been extensive, rapid, and unexpected – affecting the way we work, socialise, care for others, exercise and entertain ourselves.

Research from The University of Manchester, as part of the ESRC Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformation, explores the impact of COVID-19 on the UK public’s lifestyles and routines, focusing on activities that have significant impacts on climate change (eg, travel, food, product consumption, and energy use). Unsurprisingly, the results show that people’s everyday routines have changed in many ways during this time, and some of these changes are to the benefit of sustainable consumption.

For example, we asked people about how their shopping, cooking and eating routines had changed. Respondents described how restrictions have led to more time at home and less spontaneity in cooking and eating. As a result, people are better able to keep track of what is in the fridge and what needs using, resulting in 35% of respondents reporting less food waste and an increase in waste-reducing practices like batch-cooking, freezing and preserving food.

There are also references to the idea that in a world with coronavirus, food waste equates to risk, as it means more journeys to the supermarket where people are concerned about transmission.

These findings signal the importance of systemic factors such as timetabling and scheduling, and wider trends that have become engrained throughout the 20^th Century, like commuting. Several respondents described how their shopping habits had changed because they no longer travelled to and from work:

“Previously we would do small quick shopping trips every 1 or 2 days, to pick small stuff up at lunchtime or on the way home from work. We can’t do this anymore as we’re not in the office, so we’ve been doing one big shop and buying more to reduce the number of trips. We plan really carefully now so that we don’t waste anything, because going to the shop risks our health and the health of others.”

Here we see how shopping, meal planning and food waste become entangled in working and commuting, and how pre-COVID habits become unsettled as lockdown disrupted daily routines. These sorts of findings are interesting if we reflect on other emissions hotspots, like rush-hour and peak energy demand. Shifting the timing of energy demand provides a range of benefits, from reducing local air pollution to balancing the grid and enabling more widespread use of more intermittent forms of renewable energy.

Many of the common approaches taken to ‘time-shift’ routines focus on individual action – time-of-use tariffs and smart displays to encourage people to use energy ‘off-peak’. Yet few strategies are being rolled out to alter the broader time-space of daily routines. COVID-19 has given us a window to observe what happens when ordinary schedules – 9-5 work day, the school run, weekdays/weekends – are suspended. Working from home and having children out of school has done away with many of the more formal structures that people typically experience. And as a result, many respondents in this survey talk about how they’ve begun to experimenting with different ways of structuring their time.

For flexible workers who previously stuck to a 9-5 working day, the shift to working from home, often combined with a need to care for children, has led to great variety in how people are flexing their usual commitments – some taking longer days with breaks, or working earlier or later. There are also plenty of people describing how they switch between shorter, more concentrated ’shifts’ of work and childcare, alternating with their partner.

“As before, I usually work a 7-8 hour day, but now I usually take breaks amounting to 2-3 hours during the day, to do other activities, so I start earlier and work into the evening. I’ve found this more do-able than sitting for a 7-8 hour continuous stretch.”

This seemingly mundane resequencing of daily activities, if continued, could deliver the time-shift needed to redistribute peak energy demand. An important question then, is how, as a society, we can recover from coronavirus in a way that continues to allow space for the low-carbon habits that this survey has observed.

One line of enquiry is to reimagine employment, and potentially schooling, to benefit demand management and perhaps also wellbeing, given that people seem to appreciate having greater control over their time. For some years people have discussed the possibility that shorter working days and weeks might have benefits for sustainability and wellbeing. However, it has been difficult to gather the evidence of the impacts of such a change at a large scale and across different industries/communities. COVID-19 has forced that experimentation, and what we see in the results is that there does indeed appear to be evidence that supports the case for experimenting with different temporal rhythms.

However, it is important to recognise that for some people this time has been deeply difficult. People are concerned about their loss of productivity, they’re worried that they’re not able to do their best for dependents whilst also juggling work, and many have first-hand experience of coronavirus itself. If policy is to support experimentation with working hours, this needs to be done in an empathetic way that recognises different people’s situations and needs, and works to ensure this is an experience that does not benefit/disadvantage certain groups more than others.

Bold demand management measures are needed if the rapid and extensive reductions needed to limit the negative impacts of climate change are to be achieved. COVID-19 has forced extensive experimentation as people adapt everyday routines to new circumstances, and the early results from this research illustrate major implications of this experimentation for the ways in which resources such as water and energy are used, and how people eat and travel. Coronavirus has therefore created an important set of conditions within which to understand discontinuity in everyday practice at a large scale.