Impact case study database

The impact of this research has been to advance a ‘social egalitarian’ approach to economic policy, which addresses the design and functioning of particular economic institutions, and the way in which they might instantiate and express social egalitarian and democratic values.

**4.1 Influencing Policy for the New UK Flood Insurance Regime, Flood Re:**The flood reinsurance scheme Flood Re, introduced in 2016, is the result of a joint initiative between the UK government and the Association of British Insurers (ABI), and replaces the previous informal ‘Statement of Principles’ that had been in place since the 1960s, and which expired in 2013. Flood Re was designed to ensure affordable home insurance for high flood-risk residential property. [3.1] was critical in persuading the government and the ABI of the case for introducing Flood Re. Between March 2012 and June 2013, following publication of [3.1], O’Neill and O’Neill were involved in discussions about the future of flood insurance policy with the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), HM Treasury (HMT), JRF and other stakeholders, including the ABI and the National Flood Forum (NFF), as part of the process of policy development. The Chief Executive of the NFF stated in 2013 that [3.1] “supported us in developing criteria to allow us to judge the different models proposed”, which in turn were “used endlessly” by the NFF in media interviews and parliamentary briefings in NFF’s work to “seek a solution to the flood risk insurance problem” [5.1a]. Relating O’Neill and O’Neill’s work directly to the creation of Flood Re itself, the former Assistant Director and Head of Strategy, Data and Analytics for the ABI says: “relatively little research had previously been done on the issue of fairness in insurance, and none at all in the specific context of UK flood insurance – where the issue is especially pressing given the wide variation in risk and the relative lack of informed choice that homeowners face when it comes to exposure to risk. The JRF report [3.1], […] in presenting intellectually robust arguments in favour of ‘fairness as social justice’, was important in convincing stakeholders on both sides of the ABI’s view that Flood Re was the best possible replacement for the Statement of Principles. While Flood Re has of course been the work of very many people, making very different kinds of contribution, as explained above O’Neill’s and O’Neill’s work constitutes a significant and substantial contribution to its existence” [5.1b]. The impact claimed here is therefore the onward impact on UK households of the Flood Re scheme since its inception in 2016, as detailed below.

*Protecting Households and Ensuring Access to Insurance: Flood Re rules out a fully risk-sensitive market in insurance, working with a 25-year time horizon. The scheme imposes a levy on participating insurance companies (now 94% of the home insurance market) – raising £180,000,000 per year – in return for which those companies have the option of selling on the flood risk to Flood Re for a fixed cost. The result for eligible customers (that is, all those insuring residential property in the UK built before 2009) is that they can access subsidised premiums that are independent of flood risk. Flood Re offers customers flood insurance, for both buildings and contents, priced according to Council Tax band with a low, fixed excess of £250. Thus, the biggest beneficiaries of the scheme are customers who live in low Council Tax band properties with a high risk of flooding, who have benefitted significantly from a reduction in both their insurance premiums and the excess payable if they claim. Flood Re has had a very significant effect on the affordability and availability of household insurance for eligible homes. As comparethemarket put it: “Without Flood Re, insurance providers may have decided they simply couldn’t afford to insure people living in flood zones. This would have left many people without protection” [5.2a]. As shown in Flood Re’s Quinquennial Review, covering impact between 2014 and 2019 [5.2b], and its 2019/20 Annual Report [5.2c]: 80% of households with prior flood claims have seen a price reduction of more than 50% in their home insurance premiums [5.2b]; 98% of households with prior flood claims can now receive home insurance quotes from five or more insurers [5.2c], whereas prior to the launch of the scheme, only 9% could get two or more quotes and none could get five quotes [5.2b]. Overall, more than 300,000 properties have benefitted from the scheme – and hence from the underpinning research – since the launch of the scheme in 2016, with 196,638 households benefitting from Flood Re in 2019/20 [5.2c].

(i) Impact on Think Tanks and Policymakers: O’Neill’s research has influenced the work of a range of think tanks and policymakers around the world, including NESTA [5.3a], the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES) [5.3a], the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) [5.3b], and Common Wealth [5.3b] in the UK, The Democracy Collaborative (TDC) [5.3c] in the US, and Per Capita [5.3d] in Australia. Joe Guinan, TDC’s Vice President of Theory, Research, and Policy, writes: “My work with Martin O’Neill [3.4, 3.5] has developed an intellectual foundation for TDC’s work on social justice, economic institutions, democratic participation and community wealth building, and gives us a direction of travel, to accelerate our practical work on new forms of local economic development, creating and implementing policies that realise egalitarian and democratic aims” [5.3c]. Mathew Lawrence, one of the main authors of the IPPR’s Commission on Economic Justice (2016-18) writes that “key parts of our work - including reports on corporate governance, ownership, and automation - drew on both O’Neill’s academic and non-academic writing, including the case for 'property-owning democracy' [3.2], which was cited and undergirded the argumentation of the reports. Without it, the Commission - and certainly those reports - would have been framed on different lines, drawing different conclusions, with different policy outcomes. Given the Shadow Chancellor at the time called it ‘a modern Beveridge Report’, the undergirding role Martin's writing played was vital to wider public and political debate” [5.3b]. Lawrence established the Common Wealth think tank in 2019, and reports that “Guinan and O’Neill’s work on “the institutional turn” [3.4] helped concretely shape how Common Wealth framed its analytical focus and policy outputs, through its stress on the role of institutional design in shaping the distribution of wealth and power in our economy. Indeed, it isn't a stretch to say without Martin's careful, compelling interventions, Common Wealth would not exist, as those pieces were critical to carving open an intellectual and political space to discuss questions of predistribution. His work was and remains critical to providing a substantive political philosophy underpinning for Common Wealth's work” [5.3b]. Common Wealth has made a rapid impact in reshaping a number of policy debates on issues of economic justice, and won the “One to Watch'' category in the 2020 Prospect Think Tank Awards.

(ii) Impact on Political Parties and Broader Political Debate: Guinan and O’Neill’s work has been influential within the UK Labour Party, with the democratic argument for CWB developed in [3.5] cited in party policy documents on local government insourcing and democratizing local public services [5.4, p. 20]. O’Neill has also served since 2018 as a member of the Labour Party’s Community Wealth Building Unit (CWBU). This body contributes to policy development, gives strategic guidance to Labour local authorities implementing CWB programmes, and has created various resources for those in local government ( http://bit.ly/LP-CWBU). John McDonnell MP in his 2018 book Economics for the Many approvingly references [3.4] [5.5a, p. x], while [3.5] received enthusiastic cover endorsements from politicians including McDonnell, Jeremy Corbyn MP, and Ed Miliband MP [5.5b]. O’Neill’s writing has also been influential in the Australian Labor Party, with Jim Chalmers MP, who has served as Australia’s Shadow Treasurer (i.e., Shadow Chancellor) since 2019, writing that “Martin O’Neill’s research and presentation to a key conference here in Australia spurred significant policy thinking around predistribution and some of my own subsequent writing over the course of multiple parliamentary terms. Without his work, and other relevant colleagues’ whose work he introduced us to, the concept of predistribution is unlikely to have featured here in Australia” [5.6a]. In Ireland, O’Neill’s research has been taken up by influential figures in the Irish Green Party. Neasa Hourigan TD, writes: “As Chair of the Oireachtas Committee on Budgetary Oversight I found the analysis of community wealth building [in 3.5] useful in our work in the committee on the development of multi stakeholder inclusion in the budgetary process” [5.6b]. Both The Guardian and The Economist have discussed this research as a leading exemplar of new progressive approaches to political economy and public policy [5.7a], with extensive coverage also in US publications such as Jacobin and NPlusOne [5.7a]. More recently, Guinan and O’Neill have further developed ideas on policy remedies for economic inequality in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, producing an op-ed in The Guardian that has been shared over 5,100 times on social media [5.7b].

O’Neill and his co-authors have built a detailed and widely influential intellectual case for community wealth building (CWB): an approach to local economic policy which aims to develop community resources, reduce financial extraction by predatory companies, invest in workforce skills, and give local people more control within their local communities and economies.

(i) CWB in the City of Richmond, Virginia, USA: O’Neill’s co-author Williamson played the lead role in establishing the Maggie L. Walker Office of Community Wealth Building (OCWB) as a permanent citywide agency of Richmond City Council starting in 2014 (the first municipal agency of its kind in the U.S.), and then acted as its inaugural director from 2014-16. As Williamson describes the Richmond OCWB: “The research conducted by Martin and I played a critical and indispensable role in the creation of OCWB, particularly in focusing its work on wealth building. I drew upon the research to provide the theoretical foundations for the agency and to justify its establishment to Richmond’s city leadership, and the focus on wealth-oriented, asset-based approaches helped generate the grassroots support that has propelled OCWB forward” [5.8a]. The OCWB made use of a variety of inter-connected strategies including workforce development, social enterprise development, and targeted investments in education, housing, and transport to benefit local citizens [5.8a]. For example, it “introduced Virginia’s first ever living wage initiative and tripled the size of its workforce programme in the years since its formation, helping citizens gain access to more stable and better paid jobs. In 2018-2019 alone, that programme helped 600 enrolled participants obtain employment” [5.8a]. Thousands of other Richmond residents benefitted from its initiatives in developing social enterprises and social infrastructure, with 4,818 people per annum attending training programmes and workshops by 2019 [5.8b, p. 8]. Overall, the poverty rate in Richmond decreased from 25% in 2014 to 19% in 2019: Williamson attributes this success in large part to the work of OCWB and the principles of community wealth building that it has shared throughout the city of Richmond [5.8a].

(ii) CWB Policies and UK Local Authorities: The CWB policies of a number of UK local authorities have been shaped by O’Neill’s research and writing, both directly and via its intermediate influence on the work of TDC. TDC have advised North Ayrshire Council on all aspects of their CWB strategy (the first in Scotland), including the creation of a charter for local anchor institutions [5.9a], following the principles of CWB outlined in [3.5]. Joe Guinan of TDC writes: “In particular, working with Martin has educated me on the importance of democratic deliberation and inclusion in community wealth building practice, something which I have in turn impressed upon public officials in North Ayrshire in Scotland, where one of the world’s most ground-breaking CWB initiatives is taking shape, leading them to build community participation into their planning and implementation and redirecting resources from their £251 million Growth Deal into participatory democratic planning exercises on housing and food security” [5.3c].

Cllr Matthew Brown, Leader of Preston City Council writes: “Martin O’Neill’s work, individually and with Joe Guinan, has influenced the agenda of both Preston City Council and many local and regional authorities in the UK and abroad by helping further develop the many strategies that are implementing Community Wealth Building in local communities” [5.9b]. This influence has shaped policy approaches being taken by local authorities including Newham Council [5.9c] and the Liverpool City Region [5.3a, 5.9d]. For Islington Council, Cllr Asima Shaikh, Executive Member for Inclusive Economy and Jobs, writes that “the work of both Martin O’Neill and TDC have directly resulted in Islington Council developing a Democratic Economy strand to its inclusive economy and community wealth building work. My engagement with Martin O’Neill, both through his written work and the material and debates at the conferences he has organised, has been really useful in helping us think more about how we as a council can try to effect structural change in the local economy. [...] [This] work on community wealth building has helped us to think through how we leverage our council resources to develop a more democratic economy” [5.9e]. She continues: “For example, we are supporting co-operative and social enterprises through our commissioning of affordable workspaces. [...] I don’t think that we could have done this work, if it were not for the pioneering research and policy work that Martin O’Neill and Democracy Collaborative have done” [5.9e]. The Leader of Wirral Council, Cllr Janette Williamson , writes: “As Leader of Wirral Council I launched our CWB strategy in January 2020. It is integral to ensuring Wirral's local economy thrives and grows and is vital in rebuilding our local communities and economy in a post-Covid landscape. It was directly influenced by reading Martin O’Neill and Joe Guinan’s work on The Case for Community Wealth Building [3.5], particularly the strategy’s principles around social value, community ownership of land, and fair and ethical employment and local cooperatives, which should be adopted by every Council for the economic, social and mental wellbeing of their community. We now have a social value policy in place which has benefitted local companies and care leavers. The policy scores companies higher when they tender for a council contract if they offer apprenticeships/jobs to care leavers. This wouldn't have happened without the CWB strategy” [5.9f].