To feel our quality of life in the UK gets lower every year?

[Playingvideogames]

Off the back of another thread where I mentioned my childhood homes being bought by my parents for under 300k in the late 90s/early 2000s, and are now all selling for 700k+.

I feel like our quality of life just dwindles every year. Everything becomes more expensive. Housing is low quality, small and extortionate. The weather is awful 70% of the time. Everything feels so overcrowded with fewer green spaces and natural beauty as more housing estates go up. The roads are awful, choked with traffic and potholed. Constant roadworks here yet nothing ever seems to get solved. Customer service is a bit rubbish, nothing really works as intended. More and more rules about what you can and can’t do. People just seem stifled and stressed.

I’m sure people will rush along to say how wonderful the NHS is and similar, but I sometimes feel really envious of people living in places where (although not perfect) they have something reliable to enjoy - great weather, a nice big house, just more space and less overcrowding.

I don’t think I’m being unreasonable but I wonder if you do!

Obviously this wouldn't work for many but I wonder if a move towards more extended family setups would help.

My great-grandmother lived with my mother's family when elderly but still mobile,, did her own cooking etc, then my grandmother did the same.
Obviously this not the situation possible for many but it could work for some. Grandparents living with the family is still common in some other countries. With enough space and mutual respect it can work well.

There's nothing wrong with taking comfort in the idea that tax is being used for good and crucial purposes.

Imo the real issue is using those in genuine need to deflect from people claiming benefits who do not need them.

@Jellycatspyjamas yep - another thing to mention is the idea that it will be no big deal to go over to a pay in insurance system for healthcare - we are looking at going to Netherlands or Germany and taking our business - both are mandatory pay in schemes. We are 64 and 61 - in Netherlands it’s around380 euros for 2 ‘plus ‘ 9% of earnings, in Germany it’s around 800 euros for2!! ( not dissimilar to USA levels) plus mandatory long term care insurance. and it doesn’t stop at any age - and that’s with high taxation too, so people really do want to be careful what they wish for - if Nige brings it in , I’m pretty sure NI won’t drop much either - they say European style system and people think oh that won’t be that much - it really, really is the problem is people are expecting European standards here on what is by all expectations at the lower and low middle level of earnings quite low taxation relative to other EU country’s . Personally I would rather it was brought up to around 27% up to £60k and fund the NHS properly , fund and subsidise childcare at European levels etc and fully fund long term social care needs without recourse to assets .

Decline in quality of life is inevitable. We, as a country, enjoyed fake prosperity in the 90s and 00s based on borrowings, service economy and property, with most money coming from abroad.

Economists said the 2008 crash would take a decade to get us back to where we were before 2008, so that's ten years of stagnation/decline.

Then we had Brexit and Covid, and economists are talking about another decade to recover from that dual shock, so that's the 2020 decade a gonner.

Then of course, we've a massive balance of trade deficit due to all the imports and the decline of our manufacturing base over the past few decades. It's being artificially covered up by "invisibles", i.e. the London financial services industry, foreign money pumped into UK property, etc.

Due to the developing countries of the past few decades, i.e. Far East, Eastern European etc., there's bound to be a "balancing out" effect, i.e. they get richer, and the previously rich Western economies get poorer, and that's what is happening.

UNfortunately in the UK, the regions are neglected so the young tend to move to the major cities, especially London, and leave behind their family in the regions, so it's not really possible for the younger generation(s) to remain in their family home area due to lack of decent jobs in many regions.

Other countries have a much more balanced economy in terms of geography, i.e. Germany has several major cities, not just one major dominant city like London in the UK.

If we really want younger generations to stay living in the same area as their elderly relatives, then we need to broaden the jobs/profession available throughout the country and in every region. Of course that would also help with the severe unemployment in the most deprived regions. Yet, successive governments continue to be obsessed with London.

Great points. This is crucial. We need to tackle the north south divide and stop being overly London-centric.

Of course there is the impact of the 2008 financial crisis, Brexit and £500 billion spaffed on Covid but there is also the point that the UK population has grown enormously over the last 25 years.
In 2000 it was 58 million, this increased by 4 million to 62 million by 2010 and by a further 8.5 million to 70.5 million today.
This creates more stress on existing infrastructure, housing, healthcare, roads, water everything.
In 25 years there has been an increase equivalent to a new London and Manchester combined.

What about food inflation? Have we learned nothing from Covid.

Surely the UK should learn the lesson of selling off the family silver. There are plenty of brownfield site to go at first. One the green belt and farming land has been developed it is gone.

New Zealand.

@ThisOldThang- address your disbelief and barley concealed rasicsm to Frimley Park Hospital. There was only one occasion I visited that my brother when he was not being cared for a named nurse who was not from the the Philippines. The same when he was moved on to The Royal Surrey. I have a family member who is Filipino and a significant numbers of my family are from Myanmar. All are as capable and intelligent enough to compete nurse training and rise through the ranks as people in the UK.

Part of the problem is that local authorities receive a very high percentage of their income allocated from central government, so the Treasury has a disproportionate influence on how it's spent. If local authorities had more power to raise local taxes and spend it, there would be more competition to attract business to pay and economic development with infrastructure would rank higher among the priorities.

The South isn’t London. There’s a big difference between the capital and, for example, Barnstaple. Equally the Midlands exists. It’s more of a ‘south east versus everywhere else’ divide and even that’s not entirely accurate.

Yes,,I think more power to local governments would help.

But again house sizes and affordability make this difficult.

If (for example) a family with 2 children wanted to live with grandparents, they would need a 4 bedroom house, preferably one that could be easily adapted for elderly people (aka not a modern townhouse style). This wouldn’t be cheap at all, here a large house with potential to put a wet room downstairs and that sort of thing would be 700k+

@ThisOldThang just to add, we spent a lot of time talking to these incredibly skilled people after they sectioned my brothers trashy, adjusted his syringe drivers to keep him stable about the Philippines because we have been privileged enough to go there. We also had lots of very sobering and difficult conversations with medics from all over the world. Most had brown skin as does lots of our family. Amazingly, they are just as competent as you white people!

11% is too much. Ireland is around 2%. France 7.9%.

Sounds like what one of the mega rich would say. While their standard of living continues to go up exponentially. There is plenty of everything to go round but wealth has been unfairly and disproportionately distributed upwards.

I never cease to be amazed at people who think building on 11% of our entire country ‘isn’t that much’, like they don’t understand we need far far far more countryside than developed land to keep anything like clean air, water, farming, wildlife, areas of natural beauty, places to walk/camp/enjoy, absorb rainwater….

@Papyrophile In general, local authorities don’t have the skills. After education, their biggest expenses are adult and children’s social care, which is crippling budgets and only set to rise. Ask anyone who works in a council. Real choice over spending is already extremely limited.

As for raising taxes - tax payers, who are already being squeezed by higher taxes because of an incompetent central government, will now be hit again by the wild west of equally incompetent local government.

I don't disagree with your view on the competence of either tier of government @NorthXNorthWest . A friend who once ran the local airport used to despair of the local government officer whose fiefdom included it: her commercial background was having a village milk round.

@NorthXNorthWest while this is very true, my LA has shown incredible competence in continuing to balance the books despite tens of millions of pounds being cut year after year. Surely social care funding should be centralised?

I live and work in one of the biggest LA's in the UK and arguably we have a far greater burden of socail care needs than lots of small LA's in and around London. We also are suffering from several decades of under funding and the destruction of industry in the 70s/80s, all of which played a huge part in this country's wealth.

Can I clarify what you said about undocumented immigrants getting private healthcare while we pay? Are you sure this is correct.

According to this : Undocumented migrants can get primary care and emergency treatment free of charge — and certain services must be provided regardless of status — but they are not given private healthcare, nor do they have the same entitlement to the full range of NHS care without charges that residents do.

https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-strategies/communities-and-social-justice/migrant-londoners-hub/health-and-wellbeing/access-healthcare?ac-67660=67651&utm_source=chatgpt.com

Agree with this.

Only one thing ...theoretically a family of 4 with grandparents staying could get the children to share, which was more common in the past (would depend on children's sexes etc) and live in a 3 bedroom, but that would still be expensive. ...

I'm in a mixed race marriage with mixed race kids. I lived in Taiwan when I was younger and have visited the Philippines numerous times.

I also have lots of friends that are nurses, including an ICU nurse. We were once discussing her work and I asked about Filipino nurses and she informed me that due to training standards in the Philippines, they tended to perform more traditional nursing roles, rather than specialist ICU medicine.

I'm certainly not doubting that Filipino people are capable of training to the necessary standard, but it seems surprising to hear that an ICU is staffed exclusively by Filipino nurses.

Some people might question the truthfulness of the claim.

Regardless of which country has better this or better that, moving abroad always requires a great deal of resilience and optimism. You might enjoy some of the differences but there will always be downsides too and when you move abroad you lose the privileges that you currently take for granted: right now you are living in a system that is familiar to you, you understand it, you understand the cultural expectations, you have family and friends who know you, you have a network, you have a bank account, a passport, a pension pot of some kind, all your life admin is sorted. If you go somewhere else, you start from scratch and no one cares about you. You have to rely on people being kind to you, because they are good people, who gain nothing from helping you. I think most people who constantly moan about pot holes etc just wouldn‘t have the right skillset to enjoy moving abroad. Therefore, the choice is to be angry and seek to blame everyone around you, or to look at the positives in your life. There are many ways your situation can get worse. We‘ve got bad at being grateful and it’s easy to choose envy instead. I’m telling myself this as well!!