Supporting Communities in social Housing and Optimising Urban food System interventions for Equity (SCHOUSE)

People who live in social housing, which includes subsidised housing provided by Private Registered Providers (i.e. Housing Associations) and local authorities, face difficulties in consuming a healthy diet and struggle to afford to eat, often needing to access food banks.

This is partly because of material disadvantages faced, such as lower incomes or lack of good quality employment opportunities. But it may also be because the places they live offer fewer opportunities to buy affordable and healthy foods. Poor diet and ill-health are strongly linked, and people in social housing are more likely to have diet-related health conditions.

Overview

The SCHOUSE project seeks to better understand the reasons behind these issues, why they exist and what can be done about them to improve the life chances of people living in social housing. Our research activities predominantly focus on Liverpool, which has some of the most deprived areas and highest rates of obesity in the UK.

Our project is split into three inter-related parts. First, we will investigate what factors explain why people in social housing have poorer diets (WP1). This will involve looking at how a range of issues affect people and the places they live in by speaking to people in social housing about their experiences. We will supplement this by mapping the features of places relating to food access and diet in Liverpool into an interactive mapping tool that can help us better target our interventions.

Second, we will deliver, test and evaluate two interventions in Liverpool aimed at helping residents of social housing to access affordable healthy foods (WP2): (i) Use of a mobile greengrocer van (known as “Queen of Greens”) which provides access to fresh fruit and vegetables, and (ii) Provision of “Alexandra Rose” vouchers for purchasing fruit and vegetables at the mobile greengrocer. To do this, we will work in partnership with the three major social Housing Associations in Liverpool, local social enterprise Alchemic Kitchen, and charities Alexandra Rose and Health Equalities Group. We will also work closely with local residents to co-design the intervention and understand how it can be best delivered so that it is acceptable and feasible for end-users. This will ensure that the work is impactful and remains relevant to the local community.

Finally, we will forecast the short- and long-term health impacts of these interventions (WP3). We will use a computer model to predict the number of cases of diseases and deaths that could be averted by expanding the interventions to the whole of Liverpool and England. We will explore how these future trends will vary across different communities and social groups, as well as whether it would be cost-effective or not compared to other strategies.

Our academic team brings together many different disciplines and areas of expertise (psychology, public health, nutrition, epidemiology, health geography, health economics, modelling, systems science, statistics). We will work closely with our project partners, including Feeding Liverpool, Liverpool City Council and NHS Cheshire and Merseyside, to co-produce and deliver the research, and widely share our findings at a local, regional and national scale across different sectors (council, social housing, NHS). We expect that our project will produce new evidence on how we can support healthier diets among people living in social housing in a scalable way that can be deployed in other areas.