What do you need to be in a good place?

Everyone in England and Wales in a good place. It’s a bold vision, that guides the Lloyds Bank Foundation’s strategy.

It’s also a broad one. A lot of things need to be going right for someone to be in a good place. Enough food and money. A safe place to sleep. Good health. Knowing that you matter. Things to look forward to. Meaning. Love. Joy.

One of the most important responsibility a Foundation has is to decide how best to invest our resources in communities. Even with a broad vision, it’s important to focus. Fortunately, there’s a wealth of high-quality research and data which we could access, that helped us decide where to focus through our strategy: on three overlapping things that everyone needs to be in a good place. No one can be in a good place without all three of them.

The pillars of being In a Good Place – and how they overlap

• Personal resilience helps people cope with setbacks and take part in work, relationships and community life. But it’s difficult to build or sustain resilience without a safe and affordable home. 
• Housing provides stability. It supports people’s health, financial security and ability to feel part of a community. 
• Community belonging is built through strong relationships, shared identity and supportive networks. When people feel connected and trusted, they feel more personally resilient. 

Personal resilience

When someone’s in a good place personally, they’re more than content - they’re optimistic about their future. They have good health, physically and mentally. They have enough money to pay the bills, with enough left over to enjoy. They can access the help they need, and share it with others. They have things that give their lives meaning, be it a job where they can see the difference they’re making, or the chance to spoil their grandchildren each week. Life doesn’t feel like a slog.

Financial resilience therefore matters a lot.

Yet there is strong evidence that poverty in the UK is deepening, and that many people do not have the money to meet those basic needs:

• The Financial Conduct Authority’s Financial Lives Survey (2024) found that 11.9 million adults in the UK feel overwhelmed by financial issues.
• Over 1 in 5 people are thought to live in poverty in Wales, with a similar number of working age adults living in households which receive Universal Credit.
• 7 million adults are estimated to be behind on at least one household bill.
• Our own research with Lloyds Banking Group suggests that 4.3 million people in the UK visited a charity when facing financial challenges in 2024-25.
• Citizens Advice alone helped more than 400,000 people in England and Wales with debt problems in 2025, 44% more than during the cost-of-living crisis in 2021. 

It’s not just the sheer scale of people who are in financial trouble that matters. The complexity of the causes does too. There are significant numbers of people out of work and unable to earn, and even when they do have a job it’s no guarantee they take home enough money to thrive: around 1 in 7 jobs are paid less than the Living Wage. Poverty has an impact on children’s ability to get to school at all, let alone thrive there, and the consequences of that can last a lifetime. Family structures, housing costs, geography, social security – the list goes on.

For us at Lloyds Bank Foundation, two things particularly stood out in the data.

The first is health and disability. They are major factors in whether someone has enough money or not to live on: the poverty rate is 10 percentage points higher for people who are disabled than those who are not, and the cost of living is higher. That’s why last year we – alongside Lloyds Banking Group and our sister foundations – invested £4 million in organisations focused on disabled people’s financial resilience.

The second is how fundamental digital access is to financial resilience specifically and personal resilience overall. An estimated 3.7 million families in the UK do not have reliable access to the internet, the right equipment to operate in a digital world, and the skills and knowledge to navigate it when there. Without digital access, it’s harder to work, to find the right help, to access banking, to look up information on how to take care of yourself or others. People are more isolated, less supported, less healthy, and less well off. As the world changes, digital inclusion is going to become more and more important, which is why we’ve selected it as one of our starting point priorities in our strategy.

Housing

When someone’s in a home that’s a good place to live, they have more than a roof over their heads - they have a safety and security they can afford. They have enough space for the people and things they love. A place that’s comfortable, that they can be proud of. That they can welcome a friend to for tea. The choice to stick glow-in-the-dark stars to the ceiling of their children’s bedroom. They walk through their front door and their shoulders relax.

For an extraordinary number of people, this is not their reality.

Homelessness is rising:

• Homeless Link’s national review shows that all forms of homelessness are increasing including statutory homelessness (+4%), temporary accommodation use (+12%) and rough sleeping (+20%).
• Crisis’ research suggests that the total number of households experiencing the worst forms of homelessness now stands at just under 300,000.
• The Systems‑Wide Evaluation of Homelessness and Rough Sleeping finds local authorities facing rising demand at crisis point with interventions focusing on crisis responses rather than prevention and creating competition for funding schemes.

Yet the evidence is clear that much can be done to prevent homelessness before it happens.

For example, there are key points of transition in some people’s lives when their risk of homelessness spikes: leaving prison, leaving the care system, retirement, gaining refugee status, leaving health care settings, coming out as LGBT+ to parents, and relationship breakdowns. Those are opportunities to prevent people becoming homeless.

As the UK government’s new National Plan to End Homelessness states, “Preventing homelessness and tackling the root causes of homelessness is not only the right thing to do, it is also the smart thing.” It’s better for people’s short- and long-term wellbeing, for their agency and resilience.

And while there are many reasons that there are so many people without a home that’s a good place to live – poverty, unemployment, and disruptive events in their lives – the housing crisis is a major one. The National Housing Federation suggests that there are 8.5 million people in England who can’t access the housing they need, including 2 million children who are living in overcrowded, unaffordable, or unsuitable homes. The supply of affordable homes, particularly social homes, has not kept pace with the needs of the population.

In Wales, this is also a profound – with social housing waiting lists that research suggests could take over 35 years to clear. Experts cite a significant ‘implementation gap’ in housing policy, where governments’ goals are undermined by the lack of available, affordable homes in areas where people want to live.

The benefits of tackling the housing crisis and ensuring everyone has a home that’s a good place to live could be revolutionary, with effects not just on homelessness but on health, on the life chances of children, on the environment, and on the economy. Understandably, much focus is on the private sector and government’s role in tackling the housing crisis, but at the Lloyds Bank Foundation we’ve seen the powerful role that non-profit organisations can also play. That’s why we’ve selected supporting non-profit organisations to make available housing as one of our starting point priorities in our strategy, alongside homelessness prevention.

Community belonging

When someone’s in a community that’s a good place to belong to, they do more than nod at nextdoor on bin night - they have neighbours they can trust. They feel safe walking home, even in the dark. They get involved in things with others, be it the darts team at the pub their community owns, or a fundraiser for their local hospice. Their relationships make their lives richer.

There is so much to celebrate about English and Welsh communities. But this is often in spite of the long-term neglect they’ve experienced. Our communities are divided:

• Almost 2 in 5 adults in England do not feel that they belong to their neighbourhood, and that many people in their neighbourhood cannot be trusted.
• 37% of people report only having friends within their ethnic group.
• 1 in 5 people only have friends in the same age bracket, educational background, or from the same religion.
• 76% of adults in England believe they cannot influence decisions affecting their areas.

Yet community belonging is a vital tonic to some of our nation’s greatest challenges.

When people in communities are more connected, they’re more resilient: during the Covid-19 pandemic, places with stronger social networks coped better, with areas that had invested in efforts to increase community cohesion having higher levels of neighbourliness, trust in local government and optimism during the pandemic. Stronger relationships between residents also help discourage crime and anti-social behaviour. They’ve increasingly been shown to help boost health and wellbeing: when loneliness is lower, people are less at risk of depression, heart disease, stroke and dementia. They may even keep children out of the care system.

Community spaces and social infrastructure – the places and space where people meet, the organisations that help them thrive, and the groups and networks that bring people together – are key to connected communities. Not only do they generate connections, but they help spread access to resources, and the structures that create agency and empowerment.

That has a powerful impact on neighbourhoods. It’s been shown that, in the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods that also have low levels of social infrastructure, children have worse outcomes than equally deprived but better-connected areas. Physical spaces also allow people to challenge false information, and understand different people’s perspectives.

We see this a lot in Wales, with the dynamism, energy and talents of local communities who are organising themselves, building on a Welsh history of co-operation. A vibrant ecosystem of grassroots networks is emerging to share learning, provide peer support, and influence policy. But even here, gaps in local-level data on community assets and infrastructure, make it harder to target investment well. As a result, some communities - particularly rural and Welsh-speaking areas - risk being overlooked or misunderstood in funding decisions.

One of the most powerful forms of relationships are ‘bridging’ relationships, which bring people together across divides. These kind of relationships help people to get on and to get ahead, to improve our circumstances and opportunities, and enrich our lives. For example, relationships that bridge across economic divides are absolutely critical for social mobility: children from low-income families raised in areas with lots of cross-class friendships earn 38% more than similar people without them. That’s the equivalent of £5,100 per year. Bridging relationships are also powerful forces for increasing tolerance and acceptance of different people, values and beliefs.

As three in ten people say they rarely or never get a chance to interact with people from a different background to their own, at Lloyds Bank Foundation we’ve selected bridges across divides as our starting point for beginning to invest in community belonging.