Polls apart? A novel way of understanding financial hardship
In this blog, Billy Huband-Thompson and Jamie Hancock reflect on findings from our latest report in partnership with Insight Infrastructure at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Wave 2 2025 reveals the challenges those living in financial hardship face in the context of a challenging labour market and complex benefits system. As well as providing invaluable insight to policymakers, the report demonstrates the power of Online Listening as a methodology that directly captures the attitudes and experience of those on the sharp end of government policies.
Policymakers rightly place great value on understanding the attitudes, opinions, and experiences of the public. To design and deliver policies that materially improve things for individuals, families and communities, they need to hear from those on the sharp end of the policies they put forward.
There are many ways to elicit public opinion. Polling, interviews and focus groups – all staples of the think tanker’s arsenal – can reveal insights and tensions that can inform better policy debate and decision-making. They differ in the sort of insight they can offer but all share a common feature: the researcher shapes the conversation (to varying degrees), whether through design or simply the dynamics of an organised research discussion.
At Demos, alongside these more conventional methods, we have been working with CASM Tech on a novel approach to Online Listening. Here, rather than setting questions to members of the public, we analyse posts on online forums, revealing what issues and challenges people are raising, the support they are seeking, and the sort of advice they are receiving. This gives us ‘fly on the wall’ insights to conversations that are happening organically, without our intervention as researchers.
Over the last couple of years, we have partnered with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) to better understand people’s experiences of financial hardship. Through various quantitative techniques (outlined here), we have revealed the individuals, institutions, and benefits that people discuss, before using qualitative analysis to explore these online conversations at greater depth. Towards the end of last year, we published our analysis of online forum discussions spanning 14 years of Conservative-led government. More recently, our June 2025 report covered the early months of the new Labour government, revealing feelings of shock, anger and fear concerning the government’s (then) proposed welfare reforms.
Today, we are publishing our latest Wave 2 2025 report, which covers posts from three online forums across a three-month period from March-June 2025. For this wave, we have focused on the themes of ‘benefits’ and ‘politics and policy changes’ that featured in Wave 1 but also covered a new theme – ‘employment’.
With the UK’s employment rate still below pre-pandemic levels and 37 consecutive quarters of vacancy numbers falling (ONS, August 2025), we heard first hand accounts of people’s struggles in the job market. Posts covered fears about redundancy and unemployment, dissatisfaction with work due to pay and conditions, and a range of challenges associated with claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance. For a government aiming to reach 80% employment, boost productivity, and drive economic growth, our findings make for concerning reading.
Alongside timely insights concerning labour market woes, Wave 2 reveals the everyday hardships and struggles that those living in financial hardship face, from poor interactions with the DWP and long waiting times, to difficulties migrating from Employment and Support Allowance to Universal Credit. Here, our Online Listening Methodology allows us to pick up on requests for support and advice that give a unique account of people’s experiences – offering a window into struggles that are too often left unseen.
With the government facing poor approval ratings and increasing pressure to demonstrate that they can deliver for the public, our findings make plain the need to improve access to good jobs and tackle barriers to entry for vulnerable workers. In addition, our report highlights the need for a benefits system that is easier to navigate; one that avoids unnecessary bureaucracy and preserves people’s dignity. To design better support systems, it is vital that lived experience forms a key part of policy debates. Encouragingly, our findings reveal a real appetite among posters to online forums to have their voices heard – whether through responding to consultations, signing petitions or getting involved in campaigns.
Too often, people facing hardship are left out of the policy discussion, leaving them to be the subjects of decisions rather than empowering them to have their say. As part of this project, we have worked with the Grassroots Poverty Action Group, a group of 15 people convened by JRF, who have direct experience of poverty, to inform and guide the project. In the report, we have also included a series of bowdlerised quotes that bring these findings to life.
Taken together, our findings should help policymakers better understand the experiences of those facing financial hardship. More generally, our work speaks to the power of our Online Listening methodology – analysing unprompted conversations at scale to improve understanding of a given issue, and to ensure lived experience sits at the heart of policy discussion.
If you would like to find out more about our Online Listening methodology, please do get in touch. You can read our full Wave 2 2025 report here.