Regional Inequity of Financial Vulnerabilities and Indebtedness over Time

This project is focused on how financial vulnerabilities vary across the UK, both spatially and temporally. With rising costs of living and several international economic crises in just the past couple of decades, concerns over the stability of household finances dominate every level of decision making, from individuals choosing which expenses to prioritise, to government policy. To help understand the scale of this issue, I am focusing on the rising inability to repay outstanding debts seen across the nation.
This project is in partnership with the Registry Trust, a non-profit organisation that maintains the register of county court judgements on behalf of the Ministry of Justice. When an individual fails to repay a monetary debt in the UK and the creditor decides to take legal action in order to reclaim outstanding arrears, the dispute is taken to a county court. If the creditor's claim is substantiated, a county court judgement is issued, and the case is recorded in a national register. In 2022, almost 900,000 of these cases were processed, with a total debts value in excess of £2.5 billion. As such, the CCJ register provides an extensive source of data for understanding the distribution of escalated indebtedness cases throughout the country. This data has been largely under-utilised when examining personal consumer debt, so provides a new avenue for widening our understanding of debt obligations and how they differ across the UK, especially with regards to those that cannot be repaid.
The wider spatio-temporal variation in personal debt is poorly understood to date, with prior studies being mostly qualitative, and any quantitative work tending to focus on either larger scales (i.e. international differences) or commercial interests. This Project initially aims to utilise data science methods such as spatial clustering and regression models to identify localised concentrations of indebtedness in England and Wales, and to then explore the possible reasons for this spatial variation.
Beyond this I am also interested in looking at court efficiency and equality, exploring whether the English and Welsh legal systems are operating consistently across the country with regards to tackling debt issues and how the system responded to the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on regular proceedings across the nations.