Skip to main content
What types of page to search?

Popular pages: Undergraduate Postgraduate PhD Accommodation Research International students

Alternatively use our A-Z index.

Centre for People's Justice

The Centre for People's Justice will improve law and lives through community-led research. Led by the University of Liverpool, the Centre is the result of a £5.8m investment by partner organisations, including a £4.1m investment by the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council, the largest grant it has ever awarded to a Law School. The Centre for People's Justice will work across the UK in partnership with the Universities of Glasgow, Sheffield, Swansea, Wrexham, Ulster and the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies London.

The Centre will focus on how law is made, how law is performed in everyday life and how law is understood and applied by the public. It will put people’s everyday priorities, like their jobs, family, safety, community, neighbourhoods, at the heart of research.  The Centre will do so by working with people who have real-life experience of challenges that are commonly experienced and urgently need to be addressed: challenges such as poor-quality housing or being without a place to call home; insecure employment and low wages; violence at home or in the community; or missing out on school. It will trial new ways for local communities across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland to work in partnership with academics, private sector, philanthropic, charitable and public sector organisations in support of change in law and legal systems that will improve lives.  

The Centre is a multi-sectoral partnership


The Centre is distinctive because of its partnership with a wide range of public, private and charitable organisations from across the UK. These organisations have come together as a ‘Foundational Alliance’ for the Centre and have committed to help make its new approach a success. They include household names like The Big Issue and Citizens Advice; corporations including Costain Construction, Cadent Gas and LTE Group; cultural guardians like the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Eisteddfod of Wales and National Museums Liverpool; as well as many small and well-trusted charities. Each of these organisations will play a part in supporting research that can close the gaps between people’s need for justice and public experiences of law and legal systems in real life.

Parveen Bird, a director of the Big Issue said: 

“The Big Issue has been around for 33 years now, and we have grown by listening to the real-life needs and experiences of our homeless vendors. We are excited about our involvement with the Centre for People’s Justice. It represents the first time that The Big Issue has ever been invited to be a university research partner. It is a unique opportunity to build a new and structured way for homeless and other excluded people to be involved in creating knowledge through research. The Centre for Peoples Justice will provide a route for real-life knowledge to be taken seriously. The arts and humanities focus of the Centre is really essential for doing people’s justice research. Creative forms of expression like poetry, art, and music, provide a voice and a way to build shared understanding, and for people who are never normally listened to to be heard.” 

The Centre for People’s Justice will engage with the public’s sense of disconnection from legal process and systems, concerns about citizens’ rights and about the state of justice across society. Law runs throughout the whole of society and sets the framework for our democracy. In a radical departure from the status quo, researchers will explore new ways to learn from the grassroots up.  

The Centre for People’s Justice will put the needs and interests of the public at the heart of research


The Centre for People's Justice is designed to build research projects that explore how law and legal systems can better support outcomes that the public identify as being important for improving everyday life. For example, outcomes like access to good jobs, thriving communities, support for family, feeling safe, and having a warm and comfortable home. Many of these issues are highlighted in the Government’s mission-led approach to public service and policy reform, especially in its aims to give children the best start in life, to halve violence against women and girls, to build family security and to tackle barriers that mean too many people struggle to afford the essentials. The Centre’s work can inform government missions through research that is based on public views and experiences of everyday injustices arising from law and legal process that are unfair, poorly implemented, or poorly understood.  

The Centre’s university partners are home to leading UK law clinics, where practitioners and law students provide free legal advice, information and representation to many thousands of local people on issues ranging from sexual violence, special educational needs and disabilities, asylum and immigration, housing and employment rights. Working with law clinics is one way in which the Centre for People’s Justice can explore how the public could be better served by the justice system, better supported to access justice, and better informed about their rights.  

Another way in which the Centre will build evidence about how change in law and legal systems could improve lives, is by developing new fact-finding research projects in partnership with communities across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. For example, an initial project will focus on the way in which the public understand and respond to official correspondence from the authorities. ‘The Brown Envelope Project’ recognises that everyday law and legal processes are often experienced by the public as a letter delivered in a Brown envelope through their front door. The letter might be about an unpaid energy bill, welfare benefits information, a parking ticket or other fine, or instructions from the Home Office or Job Centre.

Organisations like Citizens Advice have highlighted how such ‘brown envelope’ letters can invoke fear, confusion and distress, particularly for those already in stressful situations or under severe financial pressure. It can mean people avoid engaging with the problem, which leads to further escalation with the authorities as well as a worsening of individual’s mental and physical health. It also means that millions of pounds of public money is spent on administration costs that could be better directed elsewhere. The research will find out about how people feel and respond to administrative letters of the brown envelope-kind and how families are affected. It will involve the public in designing solutions in which information is clearer, more effective and can better support people to address problems. The research will also work with the Department of Work and Pensions and Cadent Gas to identify how these public recommendations could be implemented.  

The Centre will take a new approach to research


The research of the Centre for People's Justice will be designed to:

  • Connect the public more closely to the ways that law is made;
  • Improve how law and rights are put into practice in everyday life;
  • Expand public understandings of law and rights, past, present and future.


The Centre brings together researchers from seven UK universities who have world-leading expertise in research about children and the importance of childhood; about employment, welfare and care; about corporate social responsibility; and about reducing violence and conflict across society. They will partner with communities to develop research questions and design research projects. The research projects will use non-traditional methods such as arts and creative approaches that are readily accessible and help foster trust, noting that 9 out of 10 people across the UK have participated in a creative or artistic activity or event in the past 12 months.

Using creative methods will enable researchers to listen carefully to what people involved in research say about injustice and social problems, to feel respected, to express their views in their own way, and reduce fears such as ‘oversharing’ or ‘saying the wrong thing’. Centre funding will be used to support and train communities to gather data, to review the research while it is in progress, and to help research findings to be put into practice for positive, lasting impacts. 


The Centre’s Principal Convenors are Professor Helen Stalford and Professor Lydia Hayes, both from the University of Liverpool. In a statement they said: 

“The Centre for People’s Justice will develop a new approach to research that can foster hope and positivity in a future for the UK in which the public feels better connected to the laws and processes that govern all our lives. In all four parts of the UK, we will work with people of all ages and all walks of life to enable them to identify changes that can better their lives, to understand their rights, and to participate in the future design of law that achieves good outcomes.

"Addressing people’s everyday concerns requires research that can identify problems as well as research that can rise to the challenge of supporting meaningful change. This is incredibly important work because securing justice across society is essential for a future with improved living standards, better health and care, for feeling safe and secure and for a society in which everyone is supported to fulfil their potential.”