Are things in the UK really that bad?

[namechange10022002]

I’ve been living overseas for about seven years and I am lucky to have a very safe, easy, comfortable life here but for various reasons I really want to move back home to England. However I keep hearing about how bad the situation is over there, with the cost of living crisis, housing, energy bills, health service, etc. For example I was watching Triggernometry and the hosts were saying the next few years are going to be extremely difficult for everyone there. I was just wondering, is it really as bad as they say? If you never watched or read the news or looked at social media, would you notice the difference in your quality of life? What is the general feeling on the ground, so to speak?

I guess I just want to know if it would be a mistake to move back there.

Rents have rapidly increased just take a look on spare room.

I'm zone 3

@MotherOfRatios sorry - but just confirming you’re actually sharing a room?

my flat is in zone 1 (south London).The tenants been there a while
and I haven’t increased the rent but newly let it would still probably “only” go for £1600 approx I thought at most.

there are studio’s in zone 1 for circa £1200.

im Sure you’ve looked around - I’m just very suprised you can’t at least get a small place on your own for that.

Hmmm. Will be interested to see what happens if I come to relet it.

London is super expensive I remember….

Phffffft.
Student DD like us is paying £1/month for electricity (the £67 from govt covers rest of our lekki bills)

I had a load of appts with GP surgery & scan in summer, no delays

We aren't struggling

Although there are A LOT of homeless in London, London restaurants ( at every price bracket) are heaving busy.

I know DC school (state) is struggling with budget, the trains are unreliable, the weather is as bad as ever... but bus fares are £2 each way & people try to help each other.

I haven't tried to call am ambulance or attend A&E in last year. Maybe I'd have different opinion if I had.

Our combined income is 110k. We do live in London and pay a mortgage on a 2 bed flat. I was looking at whether we can afford to have a baby as well as move to a bigger flat. Consensus on mumsnet was that my income is a bit on the low side for London (for a small family) but I could make it work. Would not be starving but wouldn't be comfortable either. would definitely have to increase earnings in the long term.

It’s no wonder MNers think the UK is shit if they believe they’re entitled to lifestyles which a couple with a joint income of £110k would struggle to afford. £110k gives you a take home of over £6k a month. Even with a London mortgage and full time childcare you aren’t going to be “struggling.” Perhaps they know the secret to where all these countries with high salaries and dirt cheap housing and cost of living are.

Per Mumsnet, the EU is a mecca where everyone lives in lovely big houses even if a single mum working a checkout for 16 hours a week.

They ignore the huge unemployment, poverty even in the "better" countries, that many live in rented soviet looking flats and the high taxes. Plus impenetrable bureaucracy.

They buy into the Mumsnet/Guardian BS of running the UK down and bigging the EU up. But they won't move.

Yes to this!

The UK is a good place to live, and I'm not nor have I have ever been wealthy or "Well off."

Yes is horrible i am really scared of not being able to access doctors and medicine . I want to move back to my country but my dh is not convinced yet .
We had to go to 8 different pharmacies to get her antibiotics 8 !!!!

Do not move back

Honestly check out spare room here's some
rooms I saw on twitter.

The price of a studio is now a room in London sadly

Wow. Well my tenant is on a very good deal 😂

Quite a lot of rooms are been relisted as people can't afford the rent. Surely this is costly to landlords having to relist? Rather than just keeping rents at an affordable rate so tenants can stay?

In mumsnet world we are all struggling, in real life, most people I come across seem to be getting on with life as normal with just the usual trials and tribulations of life.

I feel quite uneasy about the ambulance service though, I have not needed it recently and in fact only dealt with it twice in my 52 years but as reported it feels very rationed these days and that disturbs me. GP services well I have found these appalling for the last 25 years and have felt it has been a battle to get an appointment every time.

It has considerably declined OP. Education and healthcare are two of the markers I look to (these may be different to those of other people). But you can add in lack of policing and the fact the country seems to be obsessed with issues like 'gender' while the UK burns and children go hungry.

We're comfortable (right now) and try to take ourselves out of adding to the burden on the public purse by using private healthcare and private schools as a point of principle. We didn't go to private schools ourselves.
Of course, Mumsnet can be such a viper pit that people will presume that we're horrible, selfish, snobbish people and not see that by choosing to take this financial burden ourselves, we live significantly below the means we could.

Having lived in USA as expats for a number of years, I know that no country is perfect and was very keen to move back myself for similar reasons. If it wasn't for the gun laws, I would prefer to still live in USA.

The NHS is just not functioning and I can literally feel everyone's life expectancy, security and safety dropping by the month. I'm so angry at the blatant cronyism and mismanagement by an incompetent government who never plan for the longterm. People have useful ideas to what would help these situations, but it just seems that government have forgotten how to listen. Now we're all cutting costs, it doesn't feel good to see how much money all governments have pissed away on projects and inefficiency.
Austerity doesn't affect politicians, specifically people like Blair, Osborne, Sunak and Johnson to name a few. It's making people angry and bitter.

If I was in your situation, I'd stay in Canada and holiday in the UK to see family. I f we weren't tied to our situations here, I'd be off to Europe.

@MotherOfRatios my approach has been not to increase dramatically while there’s a good tenant in there. I don’t think relocating in itself is expensive - although there is an issue of having a void.

Relocating is expensive but surely it has to be costly for the landlord to keep readvertising? Both financially and time wise

@MotherOfRatios i meant to write relisting not relocating!

so not expensive to relistbitalef but expensive to have the flat empty

i think people get overexcited about how much they can charge

We moved back from a developing country last year. The country we moved from is known for organised crime, corruption, feminicide and unpredictable natural disasters.

So day to day, I do of course feel happier here because of safety concerns. Plus I like the outdoorsy lifestyle we can have now which wasnt possible there.

But the UK public health system is beyond belief. Our local GP surgery has basically crumbled under the pressures. We are extremely fortunate that my workplace pay for bupa for us, but my 85 year old grandmother's recent nhs care has been horrendous.

Honestly, if where you are isn't scary dangerous ... I'd stay put.

Yes it's bad

It's actually worse than you'd think going by the MSM
Esp with regards to the NHS - it's being destroyed

immigrant002
We had to go to 8 different pharmacies to get her antibiotics 8 !!!!

16 December 2022

The European Medicines Agency is investigating a chronic shortage in antibiotics across Europe, where almost every country is reporting gaps in supplies.

Twenty-five out of the 27 EU countries have reported local shortages, the agency’s Chief Medical Officer Steffen Thirstrup told a press briefing...

The antibiotics amoxicillin and amoxicillin with clavulanic acid are both in short supply across the bloc. As well as treating Strep A, they are used to treat infections of the ears, lungs, sinus, skin, and urinary tract.

www.politico.eu/article/drugs-regulator-probes-eu-wide-antibiotics-shortage/

Ambulance service is a bit of a worry and I am an NHS nurse so know things are stretched. But I do remember bad winters in the past.

Fuel bills are definitely higher.

Train strikes are annoying.

Otherwise it's ok. Think the media love a bit of doom and gloom.

Yeah apart from the fact that we're predicted to be the lowest growing out of all the G7 countries. Apart from the fact that we're now in risk of a credit rating downgrade. Apart from the fact our currency has been trashed against USD. This means we don't have the money to invest in public services.

I honestly think people just don't give much of a crap about this Country on the whole. People walk around in a little bubble of manageable until that stops happening then they get upset about it when it's too late. The strikes going on right now are a perfect example of this.

The standard of living has dropped. I don’t think anyone would deny that. Things like fruit and veg are less plentiful and there’s less variety, and they have a shorter shelf life. Supermarkets disguise this well by putting shallow row upon row of the things they do have. There was almost a whole aisle of apples in my local Tesco today, for example. People are holding on to their cars for another year, more people are relying on food banks, that sort of thing. A friend who volunteers in a food bank in leafy Surrey was in tears down the phone to me on Sunday. She has never seen such desperation and abject poverty as she’s seen over the last few months.

For those who are very rich it's OK but as others have said NHS is a total mess, unaffordable housing, overcrowding and crime are all on the rise. Would move tomorrow if we could. This country is going to the pits.

This.

Do other European countries tell you to drive someone with a suspected heart attack to the hospital cause he is young and is probably fine and there are no ambulances anw