About us

Why we exist

The way we live has changed a great deal in twenty years. We eat and drink on the move, order almost anything to the door, and get around on e-bikes and scooters. Most of this is welcome. But it has side effects nobody planned for: streets full of packaging, disposable vapes and nitrous oxide canisters dumped in parks, precarious gig work, noise complaints, nuisance vehicles, and children consuming products never designed for them. At the same time, the habits that once held communities together are fading. Fewer people volunteer than a decade ago, fewer give to charity, and only 11% of adults think their local area has improved in the last two years.

Problems like these sit in an awkward place: each one seems too small for national attention and too diffuse for any single council to solve. So they get managed rather than fixed, at growing cost. England now spends around £1 billion a year just cleaning up litter.

What evidence can do for policy interventions

Policy interventions work only with an evidence base to support them. Smoking restrictions were built on decades of research, starting with Doll and Hill in the 1950s, and adult smoking has fallen from 45.6% in 1974 to 10.6% in 2024. Scotland’s minimum unit price for alcohol was modelled by researchers at Sheffield before it became law, and the modelling proved right: alcohol-specific deaths fell 13.4%, with the biggest effect in the most deprived areas. The plastic bag charge followed evaluations of earlier levies in Ireland and Wales; bag use has since dropped 98%. In each case, research came first, and policy followed; this is what IECR aims to support.

Our work

Our work has four strands. The first is diagnosis: working out why civic responsibility erodes and where action gets stuck, whether in public attitudes, council capacity, or how responsibilities are split between tiers of government. The second is comparison: looking at what other countries and councils have tried and which designs would transfer here. The third is independent evaluation. We assess interventions against matched comparison areas, as a body with no stake in the answer, because policies that are never evaluated tend to be repeated whether they work or not. The fourth is getting the results used, through parliamentary briefings, cost-benefit assessments and draft measures that departments and councils can pick up.

Research priorities

Our research spans three broad areas. On the environment: litter, fly-tipping, disposable vapes, nitrous oxide and neighbourhood noise. On society and health: what England’s under-16 sales ban will do to energy drink consumption, and how gig economy work affects wellbeing. And cutting across both: why some councils get results where others don’t, and how the structure and incentives of public bodies shape their performance.

The team’s early studies include a Freedom of Information survey of enforcement across all 383 UK councils, a Treasury Green Book cost-benefit appraisal of camera enforcement on the motorway network, a 6,700 km camera survey of roadside conditions, and a comparison of how six other jurisdictions handle these problems.

How we work

We build a project team around each question, working with academics, councils, other NGOs and the public, through surveys and citizen science. The results come out as reports, media work and events, both in person and online. No funder, government or company tells us what to research or what to conclude.

Governance

IECR is being established as a Charitable Incorporated Organisation with the Charity Commission for England and Wales. The trustees are the charity’s voting members, with independence written into the constitution. They come from local government, law, behavioural science, environmental policy, finance and the charity sector. Meet the people behind this work on our team page.

Contact

Want to work with us, fund us, or write about us? Get in touch.