Beth Watts

Dr Beth Watts is a Research Fellow at I-SPHERE (the Institute for Social Policy, Housing, Environment and Real Estate), Heriot-Watt University. She is currently working on a five-year (2013-2018) ESRC project exploring the ethics and effectiveness of welfare conditionality, as applied to social housing tenants, homeless people and other groups of welfare recipients.

She is also working on a the Crisis and Joseph Rowntree Foundation funded Homelessness Monitors, a five-year (2011-2015) project exploring the impacts of the economic downturn and welfare reform on Homelessness. She has previously worked as a researcher at The Young Foundation, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Shelter.

In June 2013, Beth completed her PhD at the University of York, which compared homelessness policies in Scotland and Ireland. The research focused on the difference Scotland’s legal rights to housing make to the experiences of homeless people and outcomes of homelessness policy, compared to Ireland’s discretionary ‘social-partnership’ approach.