Thriving or surviving: Understanding the geography of financial precarity in Great Britain

Financial precarity, the state of economic insecurity characterised by unpredictable employment and declining social protection significantly impacts cognitive functioning, emotional stability and social inclusion. This condition stems from multiple interconnected factors: poor quality and unpredictable work, unmanaged debt, insecure asset wealth and insufficient financial resource. Despite extensive research on financial precarity's individual impacts, its geographical distribution and associated social-spatial inequalities remain poorly understood. This paper addresses this gap by introducing a new geodemographic classification of financial precarity across Great Britain. Our classification system uses small-area measurements encompassing employment patterns, income levels, asset holdings, debt obligations, and lifestyle characteristics at the neighbourhood level. By mapping financial precarity at a fine spatial scale, this research reveals how economic vulnerability varies across different localities, highlighting the uneven geography of financial insecurity between rural and urban areas, city centres and peripheries, coastal and inland communities, and how the classification groups are interwoven to the variegated patterns in and around major urban areas. This small-area approach provides sufficient detail to identify spatial patterns while enabling comparisons between local areas, offering new insights into the geographic dimensions of economic precarity in contemporary Britain. • Developed a multidimensional, spatially referenced Financial Precarity Classification for Great Britain. • Advanced the conceptual and practical understanding of financial precarity by encompassing employment patterns, income levels, asset holdings, debt obligations, and lifestyle characteristics at the neighbourhood level. • Identified 5 Supergroups and 13 Groups that reveal the complex and varied characteristics of financial precarity between neighbourhoods across Britain. • Offered new insights into the spatial dimensions of financial precarity in contemporary Britain, supporting more targeted and place-sensitive policy responses.