LGBTQ+ Welfare in Great Britain, 2022-2023

The collection consists of transcripts of semi-structured qualitative interviews with 101 people who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, gender-queer, queer, or asexual, who live in Great Britain and had claimed any welfare benefit between 2014 and 2023. The interviews were carried out in 2022-2023. Topics covered include: what benefits they had claimed; their experiences of administrative processes and frontline encounters; financial management within their household, and financial coping; savings behaviour and any assets owned; whether they had experienced discrimination for being LGBTQ+ in the process of claiming benefits.

The project aimed to understand the experiences of LGBT+ people when they access welfare benefits and engage with the welfare state in the UK. Our analysis produced the world’s first, mixed-methods, in-depth study into LGBT+ people and welfare outcomes in an advanced economy. It provides important insights to improve the effectiveness of welfare support for minoritized groups hitherto neglected within mainstream social policy. Welfare provision in the UK and beyond has been critiqued for its sexist, racist and ableist assumptions. However, issues of sexuality and gender non-conformity have yet to penetrate within this wider critical analysis to the same extent - despite growing evidence that some LGBT+ groups have lower incomes over their life course, higher rates of homelessness, and important mental health issues. Moreover, LGBT+ groups often lack recourse to traditional welfare ‘buffers’ such as family wealth or housing assets - often the consequence of non-traditional life-course trajectories and, in many cases, dislocation associated with coming-out. The arrangements of welfare state provision in the UK, therefore, may be ill-suited to LGBT+ groups. This project investigated how LGBT+ groups have fared through recent periods of welfare austerity and during the Covid-19 pandemic. We conducted a programme of qualitative research with LGBT+ people, with a particular interest in barriers they may have faced in accessing state welfare and managing their circumstances.

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