Are English people treated worse than the rest of the UK?

[Haruka]

Not a goady thread, I am foreign-born and reading the new rules on bus passes today has once again thrown up this question for me. Perhaps there are other systems in place and someone can shine a light on this and educate me.

But why is it that English people seem to constantly have worse conditions than the rest of Britain, and are we thus subsidising the other nations?

• Bus passes: new rules will link eligibility in England to state pension age, while old people in Scotland and Wales will remain eligible from age 60
• University fees: no tuition fees for Scots, but the other nations pay fees of almost 10k.
• No prescription charges in Wales or Scotland, but English people pay £9.90 per item. We all use the NHS.

I'm sure there are more. I do not mean to insult anyone; these are just current rules. So why is it that in all 3 examples the English are worst off? Do people in the other nations pay more through taxes?

I live in England but think plenty people here don't really have a clue what Scotland is like. Population density for the vast majority of the country is incomparable to England. When you have to send children to school by boat or very long bus journeys, that costs money. Maintaining long roads between tiny hamlets costs money. Scotland doesn't benefit from the economies of scale that England does so I think it's understandable that the Barnett formula at least leans in Scotlands favour.

Scots pay higher taxes and have longer waiting lists for the NHS. Scottish children do an entire year less at school. Scottish children don't benefit from the all the same free hours funding for nurseries that English children do. It's easy to look at one or two things but the bigger picture overall is different. Plenty of families would save money overall by paying less tax in England and paying tuition fees, for example.

I would think because the whole time England had a conservative government, Wales and Scotland had more left leaning parties in power who made different spending decisions.
Welsh labour definitely have their faults but on this kind of stuff they have been better than the Tory government in England

As an english person i would be more than delighted if the other countries in the UK got their independence and went off to do thier own thing without any financial assistance from england.

Exactly, health and education services are not as good as in England.

As PPs have said it's to do with a combination of things i.e. devolved government, population size (it would cost more to run the administration of free prescription eligibility for the part of the population that pays than to do blanket free prescriptions as in Wales), population make up (e.g. Wales' population is older and more unwell on average etc).

However, you need to understand it cuts both ways, and is not always to the advantage of the residents of the smaller nations. An example of this is the cut off point for income eligibility for higher earners, where residents of England can put salary over £100k into pension and still be eligible for free childcare hours, whereas this is not allowed in Wales - earn a penny over £100k gross and you lose free childcare entitlement. The amount you need to earn over this to cover tax and the childcare is a heck of a lot of money. I think that this is one of the reasons why so many GPs and NHS consultants with young children work part-time. Which in turn means that our waiting lists are so long, and since unlike residents of England we do not have Right to Choose it's a case of like it or lump it! In my case that means I am on a 6 to 8 year waiting list for a particular condition. So, swings and roundabouts.

P.S. The public transport in my area is so poor that in some cases you would need to wait overnight for a return trip from a local town, so even if I were eligible for a bus pass it would be of no use.

And as a Scot I would be delighted if Trident was parked off the south coast of England.

Are you seriously trying to suggest that 1/3 of Scotland's population attended university in Scotland in 2023/24?

I think you may have confused the total number of university students in Scotland with the number of Scottish students funded to study in Scotland. According to a detailed article in The Herald Scotland in 2022/23 enrolments of Scottish students at Scottish Universities stood at 173,745. So, as a very rough estimate, it might be reasonable to assume that there might be approximately 700,000 (4 x 175k) Scottish Government funded students attending Scottish universities during the 2023/24 period. That is less than half the number you suggested. Also, you have failed to take into account the benefits to Scotland of paying for students to study at home - less brain drain, keeps academic and related jobs in Scotland etc. The Scots have been quite clever with this, because the vast majority of fees at Scottish universities are paid for by overseas students, with students of the other home nations coming in behind that.

Welcome to democracy 😄 People get what they vote for by and large.

HS2 being a perfect case in point. An 'England and Wales' project that will benefit Wales by precisely 0%. Roll on the Senedd elections next year...

The whole "Scotland is subsidised" by England via the Barnett formula debate is so murky that it's unlikely anyone could ever really find out whether this is true or not.

Successive UK governments of all colours continually oppose Scottish independence though, so that may be the most telling observation...

But you need people to fund all this and that’s skewed to SE and London.

We can’t all expect what lower income get elsewhere. The demographics are different and that’s not helped by their politics either.

I'm from North east england. Would be more than happy for Trident to be off the coast here, and have all the jobs around it here too.

Not when it comes to childcare compared to Scotland.

You’re still reliant on funding. If we all earned lower amounts and demanded more we couldn’t have the free stuff.

If people stopped posting things on here they could just google it would be a very quiet site.

Regarding my comment to @twinklystar23 about the number of Scottish students enrolled at Scottish universities. I have just realised that the total for the 2022/23 period might be under 175,00 rather than my estimate of 700,000 having further sense checked it against % of population attending uni and % of 16-24 year olds in employment (can't track down exact stats since they do not seem to be recorded in an easily accessible fashion).

It makes more sense that the slightly sub-175k number is the TOTAL (not just 1st year enrollment) number of Scottish students at Scottish universities in 2022/23, so less than a tenth of the number originally suggested by @twinklystar23 .

Happy for any corrections from anyone familiar with the stats on this one!

This is true but sometimes these questions are really quite ingenuous and generally aimed at enraging people.

If the question was more of the "in your opinion do you think..." rather than expecting an abridged history/politics lesson then it might be a bit more honest (which frankly I don't think these posters ever are).

Partly true.

Certain specific matters are devolved to Scotland, NI and Wales. UK Gov policy just doesn't apply and decisions are made by devolved powers.

Other areas are retained by UK government and in these policies UK decides and budgets, devolved powers cannot "over rule".

The Barnett formula needs to be revised, it only takes account of population numbers and not the fact that public services cost more per head to deliver in Wales because of geographic and demographic challenges.

We would love that too. Odd though, England doesn't have an independence party. The rest of the UK have at least one in each country. In England, it's the same across the spectrum, from the Greens to Reform, they're all staunch unionists. Not sure why, since they carry the huge burden of the union entirely on their shoulders.

England, like the rest of the UK, did have free uni and prescriptions. But then they voted for parties that took them away. We didn't.
Don't look at it as something Scotland and Wales get, or a bonus, or a bribe. It's something the politicians in England reprioritised. They'd rather give handouts to large US companies than you. Why do you think so many in Scotland want to get away from this union? Even though we have devolution, Westminster retains a lot of the most important powers normal nations have, from Scotland.

That's not true! It's not outer Mongolia ffs.

I have been to outer Mongolia. There were lots of sheep and rain so it reminded me of Wales.

We are expected to pay for far better conditions in Scotland and Wales and put up with not having free prescriptions or higher education ourselves.
I would devolve them both and see how they fare without the City of London underwriting all their expensive decisions.

This is upside down.

The small rural populations of Wales and Scotland are more expensive for public services to cover.