Why No One Wants to Live in the UK

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]Britain used to mean something. Not just historically, not just in the empire sense, in the practical, daily. This is a good place to build a life sense. The NHS, the BBC, the rule of law, a welfare state that actually worked. A housing market where a working-class family could buy a home. A country where your accent might hold you back, but your work ethic could push you forward. Where the institutions were frustrating but functional. Where if you did the right things, life rewarded you for it. That Britain is gone. Not dramatically, not overnight. It has been leaving quietly for years. And in 2026, the data makes the departure undeniable. 49% of Britain say their household finances got worse in the last 12 months. Only 9% say they improved. Just 9%. 63% say they expect to cut their spending this year. 44% have already done so. Only 12% expect their financial situation to improve in 2026. 12%. Almost nine in 10 Britons do not believe this year will be better than last. 67% of households reported their cost of living increased in March 2026. 92% of those said their food bills had gone up. 68% said their gas and electricity bills had gone up. 33% say they could not afford an unexpected expense of 850 could not afford it. In one of the wealthiest nations on Earth, the food banks that were supposed to be a temporary emergency distributed 2.9 million emergency food parcels between April 2024 and September 2025 alone. 2.9 million parcels in Britain where there is a national health service and a welfare state. And only 8% of Britain say the government is handling the cost of living well. 8% 85% say it is handling it badly. The lowest net score since Yuggov began tracking in 2022.

[00:01:42]This is not a country in crisis in the dramatic, visible, televised sense. This is a country that is quietly, systematically becoming impossible to live in for the people who actually live in it. This is the fiscal historian where every video changes how you see money, history, and power. If you are new here, subscribe and turn on notifications right now. Here's the question for the comments. If you live in the UK, do you feel like it has genuinely gotten harder to live here?

[00:02:08]And if you left, what was the moment you decided to go? Drop your honest answer.

[00:02:13]We read every single one. To understand why no one wants to live in the UK anymore, you need to start with what the last 5 years actually cost, not the headline inflation number, the cumulative reality. UK CPI inflation peaked at 11.1% in October 2022. The highest rate since 1981, the worst inflation shock in a generation. Food price inflation peaked even higher at 19.2% in March 2023. Meaning the typical weekly shop cost nearly a fifth more than a year earlier in a single year, nearly a fifth more. By mid 2024, CPI had returned to around 2%. And politicians celebrated. They said the crisis was over. Inflation was back to normal. What they did not say, what they carefully avoided saying is that prices do not fall when inflation falls. Prices stop rising as fast. The 20 to 25% above pre-crisis levels that cumulative inflation created does not disappear when the rate drops to 2%. It stays baked in permanent. The shopper who was paying 100 for a weekly shop in 2021 is now paying 120 to 125 every week forever. While the politicians declare victory over inflation and in 2026 inflation has risen again to 2.6% 6% as of February with food inflation still running at 4.9%. Above wages again the crisis the politicians said was over is not over. It never ended for the people paying for it. The first mechanism destroying life in the UK is energy. And the numbers in 2026 are a specific kind of brutal. The Alvjum energy price cap for the first quarter of 2026 stands at 1,738 per year for a typical dual fuel household.

[00:03:57]738.

[00:03:58]That sounds manageable until you understand the context. The pre2021 average energy bill was approximately £850.

[00:04:06]Britain's energy costs have roughly doubled and stayed doubled. In April 2025, nicknamed Awful April by several media outlets. Water and sewage bills increased by an average of 26.1%.

[00:04:18]The fastest increase since the late 1980s. 26% on water bills. In a single year, over 6.5 million British households are classified as being in fuel poverty. 6 and a half million. In a developed G7 economy, the phrase heat or heat, the choice between warming your home and feeding your family, became so common it spawned academic research papers. Researchers documented single parents in the UK choosing not to heat rooms, not to cook hot meals, not to run appliances because the energy cost was impossible against the income available.

[00:04:49]in Britain in 2025 and 2026 and 37% of Britain's say energy and utilities are their top financial concern. The most common concern of any category above housing above food. The country that pioneered the industrial revolution cannot reliably heat its own homes at a price its citizens can afford. The second mechanism is housing and this one has been building for 30 years but reached a new stage of impossibility in the 2020s. The average UK house price in early 2026 is approximately £268,000.

[00:05:22]The average UK salary is approximately £35,000.

[00:05:26]That is a price to income ratio of approximately 7.6 to1. Economists consider 3 to four times income affordable. Britain is at nearly 8. In London, the ratio is 14:1.

[00:05:38]14. A teacher earning £35,000 cannot buy the average London property. Even in theory, even with a large deposit, even with a partner earning the same, and rents have followed house prices upward, demand outstripping supply in major cities is driving rental costs up by 5% yearonear. In November 2025, 22% of British adults said they had to borrow more money or use more credit than usual in the previous month compared to a year ago, borrowing more than the year before. In the middle of a supposed recovery, the Bank of England's mortgage market has settled at painful levels.

[00:06:10]The average 2-year fixed rate in early 2026 is 4.3%. The Bank of England base rate stands at 4.5%. Those who locked in 5-year deals in 2021 at under 2% are now coming off those deals and facing payment shock. Monthly mortgage payments rising by hundreds of pounds. 3.9 million households still face an increase when they reortgage. 3.9 million. An entire category of homeowners who thought they were safe discovering they are not. And for those who rent, the situation is even starker.

[00:06:38]Rents rising 5% annually against wage growth that cannot keep pace. In the cities where jobs actually exist, material deprivation, the proportion of working age adults who cannot afford basic items increased from 19.6% in 2019 to 20 to 22.7% in 2023 24. More than 1 in five working age British adults cannot afford items that used to be considered basic necessities, not luxuries, basic necessities. The third mechanism is wages and the poverty trap. And this is where the hidden cruelty of Britain's situation becomes most visible. Real wages, earnings adjusted for inflation, fell for approximately 22 consecutive months between mid 2021 and early 2023.

[00:07:20]22 months of falling purchasing power.

[00:07:23]At the worst point, real regular pay was falling by over 3% per year, the steepest real terms decline in decades.

[00:07:30]Since June 2023, wages have started growing faster than headline inflation.

[00:07:34]The government points to this as evidence of recovery. But the headline inflation number is not the number that matters to working families. The number that matters is the cumulative cost of everything essential, which remains 20 to 25% above 2021 levels against wages that did not rise by 20 to 25%. That never rose by that amount. The real household income that fell during the crisis has not been recovered. The Resolution Foundation estimated in late 2023 that household incomes would not return to pre-crisis levels until at least 2027. At least 2027. The Joseph Rotry Foundation projected in 2025 that disposable incomes would continue to decline for the rest of the decade. The rest of the decade. Not until things recover for the rest of the decade. And the poverty trap makes it worse. The research is vivid on this point. One participant in a study of low-income households described being offered a job, running the numbers, and discovering that after bus fairs and child care, returning to work would leave her 200 pound a month worse off.

[00:08:33]200 lb worse off for going to work.

[00:08:35]Working making you poor than not working. This is not a failure of individual responsibility. It is the design of a system that has become so poorly calibrated that it actively penalizes the people it is supposed to support. The fourth mechanism is the NHS. And this is the one that cuts deepest into the British national identity. Because the NHS is not just a health care system in Britain. It is a belief system. It is the thing that separates Britain from America in the British imagination. The thing that says here, "We do not let people die because they cannot pay." The NHS is struggling in ways that are no longer disguisable.

[00:09:09]Waiting lists that were already long before the pandemic were made dramatically worse by it. In 2026, the NHS waiting list contains millions of patients waiting months or years for treatment. Over 7 million people are on the NHS waiting list. 7 million people waiting for care they were promised.

[00:09:25]Doctors and nurses have been leaving for years, not because they do not care about patients. Because the wages do not match the cost of living, the working conditions have deteriorated. And because Australia, Canada, and New Zealand are actively recruiting British NHS staff at higher salaries in better funded systems. The brain drain from the NHS is not a crisis in waiting. It is a crisis in progress. Nurses went on strike for the first time in decades, citing failing wages, inflation, overwork, and underfunding. Doctors went on strike. Junior doctors went on strike. The health service that is the proudest institution in British public life cannot retain the people needed to run it. At a wage the people running it can live on in the country they are supposed to be serving. And a private shadow system is growing. Those who can afford it are paying for private health care because the public system cannot see them in time. A two-tier system is forming in real time where the wealthy get timely care and everyone else waits and calls it universal health care. The fifth mechanism is the political failure and this is the one that explains why the crisis persists despite being so visible. Britain has had multiple governments since the crisis began.

[00:10:32]conservative governments that created many of the underlying conditions and a Labor government elected in 2024 on a promise of change. In January 2026, only 8% of Britain say the current government is handling the cost of living well. 8%.

[00:10:47]85% say it is handling it badly. This is not partisan. Across every voting group, conservative, Labor, Liberal, Democrat, reform, the overwhelming verdict is that the government is failing. The public identified the government's failure to take strong action as more likely to be the reason for rising prices than any other factor, including company profitering, Brexit, or Ukraine. 65% believe government inaction is a primary cause. The public is not wrong. The structural problems driving Britain's cost of living crisis are not mysteries.

[00:11:18]Britain does not build enough housing.

[00:11:20]Its planning system is designed to give existing homeowners the power to block new development. Its energy market was designed for a world of cheap Russian gas that no longer exists. Its wage floors have not kept pace with the cost of the lives those wages are supposed to fund. Its NHS is chronically underfunded relative to comparable healthare systems. All of these problems have known solutions. All of them have been documented by economists, think tanks, and parliamentary committees. None of them have been implemented at the scale required because implementing them at the required scale costs political capital, threatens the interests of people with power, requires telling voters things they do not want to hear.

[00:11:56]And the system of short electoral cycles and immediate political calculation continues to produce the same outcome.

[00:12:01]Fund the present, defer the future, announce the policy, avoid the implementation, and hope the next government inherits the consequences.

[00:12:09]The sixth mechanism is the brain drain.

[00:12:11]And this one is the most important signal of all because when the talented, the mobile, the people with options start leaving a country, that country is telling you something about itself. The UK has been experiencing one of the most significant immigration waves in its modern history. British nationals are leaving for Australia, Canada, the United States, Spain, and Portugal.

[00:12:32]Doctors trained by the NHS are being recruited actively by Australian and Canadian health systems. Young professionals who cannot afford London rents on London salaries are moving to Berlin, Lisbon, and Amsterdam where the math works better. The people leaving are not the people with nothing. They are the people with qualifications, skills, and enough savings for a move.

[00:12:52]They are the nurses and the engineers and the software developers and the teachers and the financial analysts. The people who in another era would have been the backbone of the British middle class. Building lives, paying taxes, raising children, contributing to communities. They are leaving and they are being replaced in the political conversation by a debate about who should be allowed in. While the people who are already here, who were born here, trained here, and worked here, are quietly making other calculations.

[00:13:19]The immigration data is not yet as dramatic as the other numbers, but the direction is unmistakable, and the consequences of losing a generation of skilled workers to countries that offer them a functioning life will compound for decades in the form of a smaller tax base, a weaker economy, a public sector that cannot recruit at the wages it can afford to pay. Britain is losing the people who could fix it to the countries that treat those people better.

[00:13:44]The seventh mechanism is what economists call scarring. And this is the most important concept for understanding why the UK's situation is not a temporary crisis but a structural shift. Scarring happens when a prolonged economic shock changes the behavior and expectations of people permanently. Not just during the shock but afterward. The British households that spent 2022 and 2023 cutting back, switching to budget supermarkets, cancelling subscriptions, reducing heating are still doing many of those things in 2026. Not because inflation is still at 11%. Because the habits formed during the crisis and the financial holes created by it have not been repaired. Shoppers switched to budget ranges and discount supermarkets in 2022. That shift remains entrenched in consumer behavior in 2026, a behavior that economists note is consistent with a scarred consumer, one who has updated their expectations about life downward and does not return to previous spending levels even when conditions improve. The young people who could not afford to buy homes during the crisis still cannot afford to buy homes. The workers whose real wages fell for 22 months have not fully recovered that purchasing power.

[00:14:48]The pensioners whose fixed incomes were crushed by 12 a.5% effective inflation did not receive retrospective compensation. They simply became poor permanently. The scarring is real, measurable, and in many cases irreversible. The Britain of 2026 is not the Britain of 2019 that was temporarily disrupted. It is a new, poorer, more financially stressed Britain that will require years of sustained real wage growth, housing supply expansion, and public service investment to return to anything resembling what it was. And none of those things are happening at the required scale. The eighth mechanism is the inequality story. And this one runs beneath everything else. The cost of living crisis in Britain was not experienced equally. It never is. The ONS confirmed that households with the lowest incomes experienced a higher than average inflation rate throughout the crisis because low-income households spend a greater share of income on food and energy, two of the most rapidly inflating categories. While wealthier households experienced inflation of 9.6% at the November 2022 peak, poorer households experienced 12.5%.

[00:15:51]Due to heating costs, those aged over 80 experienced 15.3% 15% inflation. For the most vulnerable people in the country, the median income for households in the lowest 10% of earners fell by 6.6% in real terms between 201920 and 2022 to 23 6.6%.

[00:16:11]While the wealthy saw their asset values rise because quantitative easing, near zero interest rates, and the post-pandemic asset surge made stocks and real estate more valuable at the exact moment the wages and savings of ordinary Britons were being destroyed.

[00:16:25]The cost of living crisis was in very measurable terms a transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to those who hold assets. The research participants who told interviewers they are making the rich richer and the poor poorer were not expressing a political opinion. They were describing what the data shows. So what does Britain in 2026 actually feel like for the people living it? It feels like a junior doctor working 50-hour weeks in an understaffed hospital, going home to a shared flat in a city where a one-bedroom apartment costs half their take-home pay. It feels like a family in Birmingham choosing between the heating and the weekly shop in the fourth year of making that choice. It feels like a young professional in Manchester looking at their salary, their rent, their energy bill, and their food costs and doing the math that shows moving to Berlin or Lisbon makes financial sense. It feels like a pensioner in Liverpool on a fixed income that was adequate in 2020 that has been comprehensively eaten by 5 years of cumulative inflation and who will not receive the compensation that would make it adequate again. It feels like a generation of young British people who were told to work hard, get qualifications, contribute to society and discovering that doing all of those things does not deliver the stable, comfortable life those things were supposed to deliver. Not in 2026 Britain. Not anymore. And the question they are increasingly asking is not how to fix Britain. It is whether Britain is worth fixing. Or whether the energy, the talent, the ambition, the working years are better spent somewhere else. In the country where the math works, in the country that still delivers on the promise that hard work is rewarded. The immigration answer to that question is the most important economic signal Britain is sending. And the political class is not yet listening. Britain is not collapsing the way Venezuela collapsed. There are no food riots, no currency in freef fall, no government default. The lights stay on, the shops are open, the trains run sometimes, the institutions function after fashion, but the quiet metrics of a functioning society, the ones that tell you whether ordinary people can build ordinary lives are moving in the wrong direction.

[00:18:23]Almost half of households got poorer last year. Only 9% got better off. Food banks distributed nearly 3 million parcels. Over 7 million people wait for NHS treatment. 33% cannot afford an unexpected expense of £850 and only 12% believe this year will be better. 12% in 2026 in Britain and one of the oldest and richest democracies on earth. But if you do not understand it, it will crush you all the same. Britain built one of the most admired societies in human history. And it has spent the last 15 years allowing the foundations of that society to be quietly eroded by housing policy that protects existing owners over new ones. by energy policy that left the country exposed to global price shocks. By wage policy that allowed real earnings to fall for 22 consecutive months. By health policy that underfunded the institution the whole country depends on. By political cycles that reward the announcement of solutions without requiring their actual delivery. The lucky ones are leaving.

[00:19:20]The rest are adapting and calling it normal. Because it has been this way long enough. That normal is what it has become. If this gave you a new perspective, hit subscribe. The fiscal historian.