I see a huge difference between now and 10 years ago, I think that a decade ago extreme poverty was generally the result of a complex situation, often because of debt, health difficulties, mental heath etc. Today I think that we have a huge number of people in poverty. Homelessness is visibly much higher, over a million people access food banks, the idea of charity preventing malnutrition in such a rich country, it's baffling.
I think that there has been a clear transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, the banking crisis hit us harder than most countries as so much tax was being paid by those working in finance. The decision to cut public spending so hard and not to raise taxes for the wealthiest has resulted in huge difficulties.
The government has done nothing to address the housing crisis in any meaningful way, councils are unable to borrow to build new housing, supply of social housing is woefully inadequate. On top of this private renting is not properly regulated, one of the reasons people in Germany are happy to rent isn't some greedy British desire to own a house, its because the rental regulations there mean that people are not as vulnerable to be kicked out at a moments notice, people feel secure in rented accommodation, in the UK this isn't the case. Part of the issue with rented regulation is that half the MPs are landlords, because when they were stopped from claiming mortgage interest they rented out their mortgaged second properties so they could continue to profit from the housing boom and claim rent from expenses. Obviously them all benefiting from rising house prices is also a disincentive to sort out obscene price of property.
When Thatcher introduced right to buy we had a surplus of council houses (can you imagine).
The policy of 'making work pay' has obstensivly worked, although rather than making working more attractive, they've made benefits so awful that a zero hours min wage contract is more attractive. The problem with the gig economy is that fewer workers are paying any tax and more of them need benefits. If we don't tax the corporations either then we don't have money for services.
Someone mentioned school places, the problem here is that councils although responsible for ensuring enough school places are available are not able to build any schools. They instead have to liaise with academies and persuade them to expand as needed. Free schools have sucked resources from the system and aren't required to be set up in places that actually need a new school. Academy chains also seem to have creamed off some serious money for their directors.
The NHS isn't suffering because of migration, but from a lack off it, 100,000+ vacancies across the service, obviously removing training bursaries isn't helping either. 10 years ago it was fully staffed and relied on the good will of its staff contributing 1000's of hours work for free, today it is becoming dangerous I fear.
What baffles me is how all these people who voted leave have so much faith in the government. For all it's faults the EU has held the UK government to account on pollution, improved workers rights and funded projects in the most deprived areas of the UK.