Name: Why No One Wants to Live in the UK
Uploaded: 2025-05-26T23:18:17.000Z
Duration: 19 min 15 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

It's the capital city of the United Kingdom, and one of the richest cities in the world, with an economy worth more than half a trillion dollars.

Meaning that if it were a country, it would have the 26th largest economy in the world, roughly the same size as Norway's.

And for nearly two centuries, both in Britain and Europe, it's been a hub for high value services like finance, offering some of the highest In 2023, London's councils estimated that more than 1 in 50 people in the city are homeless.

This is a figure which has risen by more than 50% in just 10 years, which means Britain now has by far the highest level of homelessness in the developed world.

All this while real wages, that is what people take home after accounting for inflation, have remained flat for over 15 years.

This means people are being paid roughly the same as they were in 2008, while the prices of almost all goods and services have increased, and essentials like housing have skyrocketed.

It's therefore no wonder that people are beginning to leave the UK at an unprecedented rate.

A junior professional could earn more than double in New York compared to London, with the cost of living only around one third higher.

Because of this, every year, more and more of Britain's young, skilled workers leave the country for a better life elsewhere, particularly from Britain's famed National Health Service, which is facing a potential exodus of doctors and nurses due to poor pay, overwork and deteriorating working conditions.

People flooding out of the UK is perhaps a good metaphor for the current state of the British economy, and ironically, more people from outside the UK are immigrating to work in Britain each year than ever before.

Whilst it's true that the primary reason of migration is to use the UK's world-leading education services, research conducted in 2015 found that those leaving the country were significantly more skilled than those entering the nation each year, stating that increases in net migration over the last decade have significantly increased the pool of low-skilled workers in Britain's economy.

Offsetting skilled workers with less skilled workers is not good for any country, as it ultimately means lower productivity and a poorer quality of goods and services that are offered within the economy.

So why could it be that a seemingly wealthy country like Britain is seeing a mass exodus of some of its most talented and youngest workers?

Part of it has to do with living standards in the UK becoming worse and worse each year.

In fact, this was the main reason given by Britain's leaving the country.

And this makes As if you remove London's output and population, it would shave off 14% from British living standards, making the remaining UK perform worse economically than Mississippi, the lowest-ranking US state in terms of per capita economic performance.

This all ties into a growing theme, that the UK's best days are behind it, and one which is also supported by the data.

In 2007, the average UK household was just 8% worse off than its peers in northwestern Europe.

But in the 15 years that has followed, this gap has grown to a record 20%.

On present trends, the average Slovenian household will be better off than its British counterpart by 2024, and the average Polish family will achieve the same feat by the end of the decade.

And these stagnant wages is a burden which is being disproportionately felt by those with lower incomes.

While the UK's top earners rank 5th for living standards, the average household ranks 12th, and the poorest 5% rank 15th.

Far from simply losing touch with their western European peers, last year the lowest-earning bracket of British households had a standard of living that was 20% weaker than their counterparts in Slovenia.

This is part of a growing paradox, that as more and more people move to the UK, its levels of public services and pools of skilled workers are gradually declining.

So let's take a look at why this is happening to one of the richest countries in the United Kingdom.

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It wasn't that long ago that Britain was one of the most prosperous and attractive destinations for young skilled talent in the world.

A feeling which is shared by many Britons too.

A recent poll found that 60% of respondents view life as being better in the 1990s and 2000s than today.

This era in particular is looked back upon with nostalgia for many British people.

Music from bands like Oasis and the Spice Girls were worldwide hits as the cool Britannia movement swept the country and the end of the cold war was also adding to a global sense of optimism.

Of course there is always a tendency for people to view the world of the past favourably but the 1990s stand out in particular as they were a period of real economic success for Great Britain.

Despite a rocky start to the decade, marked by the turmoil caused from the fallout by the ERM and a recession in the early 1990s, the UK entered an era of remarkable economic resilience.

From 1992 onward, Britain enjoyed its longest stretch of uninterrupted growth since the Second World War.

Driven by a combination of structural reforms, effective monetary policies and favourable global conditions, this period, often referred to as the Long Expansion, was characterised by continuous GDP growth and significant productivity improvements.

The financial sector played a pivotal role in this economic success, with substantial credit expansion, particularly in property lending, driving consumer spending and investment.

Regulatory change also made the UK an attractive place to invest, meaning the UK retained a positive balance of net income from abroad.

However, in this decade, Britain continued to shift towards a more service-based model of employment, and while prosperous, it did not provide the broad-based employment that the industrial sector had, causing widespread job losses in areas like heavy industry and mining, jobs which tended to be located in poorer areas of the country, away from cities like London.

The UK continued to grow in this period, however, midway through the 2000s, a number of problems were starting to appear, and the financial crisis of 2008 exposed and exacerbated these underlying weaknesses in Britain's economic model, revealing an over-reliance on financial services and a lack of adequate investment in other vital sectors.

Today, the nation grapples with a number of severe issues, including an overstretched NHS, a housing affordability crisis and ageing infrastructure, all of which stem from past policies and require urgent attention to secure a sustainable future.

Perhaps the most important issue for people living in the UK right now is that of housing.

Not only are there not enough homes, but ones which exist have become unaffordable for the vast majority of the population.

This has made home ownership for first-time buyers nearly impossible without an income far above the average, or financial support from the so-called bank of mum and dad.

The UK has consistently built fewer homes compared to the needs of its growing population, especially when compared to other developing countries.

This shortfall is largely due to restrictive planning laws, limited government funding for public housing and a prioritisation of other economic areas over residential construction.

Over the decades, the cumulative effect of not building enough homes has led to a significant supply demand imbalance in the housing market.

This is an issue which has its roots in policies of the past.

Introduced in the late 1970s, the Right to Buy scheme allowed tenants in public housing to purchase their homes at a discount.

At the time, this policy was seen as really progressive, as it made home ownership achievable for those who before could only have dreamt of it.

And while this policy enabled many people to own a property, it also led to a substantial reduction in the stock of social housing.

And since these homes were not replaced at a sufficient rate, the social housing sector shrunk by about 25% since the 1970s, all while the population has continued to increase.

With fewer social homes available and ongoing challenges in housing affordability, more individuals and families have turned to the private rental sector.

This increased demand has naturally led to rising rents, as the supply has not adequately kept pace with the demand.

Rising rental costs have disproportionately affected those on lower incomes, who find fewer affordable options available, and usually need to compete on price for what they can afford.

And what makes all this worse is that house prices have continued to outstrip real wages for well over 30 years, creating an even bigger difference in society between those who own their homes and those who don't.

Housing supply is of course an issue across a number of Western European economies, however it's particularly bad in the UK.

In England, there are now 1.4 million fewer households in social housing than in 1980, all while the UK's Gini coefficient, a measure of inequality, has been steadily rising.

This has led to overcrowding, both in the private sector and in social housing.

And what this means is that on an unprecedented scale, more and more households are being pushed into homelessness, but one which is less visible to the broader public.

After declining for several years, the number of English households living in temporary accommodation has more than doubled between 2010 and 2023, from 48,000 to 112,000, the highest figure since records begun.

Conditions in these buildings are often atrocious.

Damp and mould are commonplace, as are insects and animal infestations.

The adults drop out of work and children out of school, further decreasing social mobility, as those unfortunate enough to live in these conditions are even less likely to earn a higher income in the future.

These arrangements also impose enormous costs on local councils, which last year spent almost $1.8 billion on emergency shelter, a figure that has more than doubled in real terms over the past decade.

This nightmare scenario is due to three main factors.

Woefully inadequate rates of house building, a dwindling social housing sector, and the erosion of financial support for those unable to afford market rents.

And these issues aren't likely to get any better soon, as shifts in the UK housing market have disproportionately disadvantaged the youth.

A significant portion of older individuals own a second home, whereas young adults today are far less likely to own even a single home and are far more likely to rent.

This change reflects broader economic trends, where stagnant wages contrast with soaring asset values, exacerbating wealth disparities.

The slower economic growth also means fewer opportunities to advance your career, impacting earnings, especially during critical early stages.

In the UK, it used to be the case that you could expect to earn more or have a better economic outlook than your parents.

However, this trend looks to have died, as those born in the 1980s have generally earned less by the early 30s compared to the previous generation.

Unable to afford a home, and with dwindling wages, it's no wonder that some of the UK's most talented individuals are leaving for other countries like the US, Australia, and New Zealand, which offer a quality of life more appealing for ambitious and productive British workers.

Stagnant wages are of course a major factor in this, and this is largely thanks to dwindling productivity across the country.

Productivity is the efficiency with which a nation produces goods and services from its inputs, labour and capital.

And since the financial crisis of 2008, the UK has faced a stark slowdown in productivity growth.

Before the crisis, productivity was growing at around 2% annually.

However, after the crisis, this growth has nearly flatlined, and notably there have been a significant decrease in investment.

Since 2005, UK companies have invested 20% less than their counterparts in the US, France, and Germany, placing Britain in the bottom 10% of OECD countries.

This under-investment has resulted in outdated technology and equipment, reduced innovation, and a shortfall in skill development across both industrial and service sectors.

And consequently, the overall efficiency and innovative capacity of the UK economy has suffered, leading to slower productivity growth.

And nowhere is this clearer than with the UK's National Health Service.

The National Health Service, or NHS, was established in 1948 as a publicly funded health service that was free at the point of access.

Since its introduction over 70 years ago, the NHS has become a staple of British life, and something which is taken for granted by many people.

However, as time has gone on, and especially in the last two decades, costs have started to spiral, as the quality of treatment and care provided has declined.

This is partly because when it was first introduced, Britain's population was significantly smaller, and also much younger, meaning fewer people required healthcare and treatment.