The deal that got repriced

A particular feeling is spreading through British life: going back to the NHS, the train, the landlord, the energy bill, the council, and finding each one both worse than last time and more expensive.

For years, one answer has dominated the debate: migration. Yet despite consistent numbers disproving this claim, the explanation persists. This piece offers a direct account of where the money truly went, why things deteriorated, and what rebuilding would require.

Start with what most people can feel without a chart. For example, the NHS waiting list peaked at 7.7 million in September 2023; as of September 2026, it sits at 7.1 million, with roughly 94,000 patients waiting more than a year for treatment. Meanwhile, Council Tax has been rising at around 5% a year, the steepest sustained real-terms rise since the early 2000s, while the services it pays for have shrunk or vanished. Bin collections are now fortnightly. The local library closed last year. The road outside has been patched three times in eighteen months and is still failing.

Then consider the bills. Rents have outpaced wages for a decade—median private rents in London increased by 30% over the past five years, while wages grew by less than 20%. The deposit on a first home in London is roughly a year’s median salary, currently just over £35,000; out of reach for most without parents. The water bill is expected to rise by 7.5% this year. The train fare is going up by nearly 6%. Notably, for many young households, the childcare bill has quietly become the largest line item—often exceeding £1,200 a month and exceeding the mortgage in much of the country.

You feel it every time you ring the surgery, and they cannot see you for three weeks, or when the same train is late again. The cheap option—the council house, the bus that turned up, the GP you could see the same day—has not just grown more expensive, but has disappeared. What remains is expensive and poor. There used to be a middle. The middle is gone.

This is not a sudden crisis but a long-term decay. The widespread feeling of decline is justified, but the usual explanation is not. If we misidentify the cause, we will also seek the wrong solution. This piece aims to directly challenge the prevailing narrative.

Why the statistics miss what you feel

Average real wages are technically slightly higher in 2026 than in 2008. However, this figure is skewed by high earners at the top, who have seen significant income gains. For most workers, wage increases have not kept up with rising costs, creating a disconnect between the official average and most people’s experiences. This disconnect between reported averages and personal experience explains why the statistics often feel incomplete.

Between 1980 and 2007, real wages in Britain grew at about 2.7% annually—a sign of a healthy, growing economy where productivity gains benefit workers. From 2008 to 2023, real wage growth flatlined at 0% annually, meaning no real increase for most people. The Resolution Foundation calculated that if pre-2008 trends had continued, the average worker’s pay would now be £11,000 higher each year—a significant sum that could cover major expenses like a mortgage payment, a childcare bill, or a family holiday.

The median pay for FTSE 100 chief executives in 2024-25 was £4.58 million—about 122 times the median UK worker’s earnings. By early January, these CEOs have typically earned as much as the average office cleaner earns for the rest of the year. In 2026, The Sunday Times Rich List counted 157 billionaires with a combined wealth equal to 22% of the UK’s GDP. This shows that economic growth has been concentrated at the top and not distributed to most people.

The headline inflation figure misses this, too. CPI weights a basket designed for the average household, but it does not reflect the inflation experienced by a household spending 40% of its income on rent, where the rent has risen faster than anything else. In this way, the statisticians are not wrong; they are simply counting on a different economy from the one most households live in. The gap between the economy promised and the one that arrived has a cause.

The hypothesis that’s been tested and failed

The simplest test of a theory is whether it predicts what happens when the conditions change. The theory on offer for a decade is that the services have got worse and the country has got more expensive because of immigration. So let us test it.

Net migration reached 944,000 in the year ending March 2023. By June 2025, it had fallen by about 80% to around 204,000—a return to roughly pre-pandemic figures. The Health and Care visa allowed 105,000 arrivals in 2023-24 but was reduced to 44,000 in 2024-25 and banned entirely from July 2025. This means the government made a clear and significant policy change regarding migration numbers.

Yet, the services have not recovered. The NHS waiting list is still 7.1 million people. NHS staff vacancies total 100,020, a vacancy rate of 6.7%. The social care sector faces an 8.3% vacancy rate, nearly four times the national average of 2.1%. Meanwhile, Council Tax is still rising at its fastest real-terms rate in a generation. The bin rounds have not come back. The GP appointments have not come back. Migration fell; the waiting list did not.

The Health and Care visa cut demonstrates this clearly: after frontline care visa numbers were reduced, staffing shortages persisted. New workers did not arrive from elsewhere, showing that the vacancies were not created by migrants filling jobs—rather, wages and conditions were insufficient to attract any workers, whether local or from abroad, in the required numbers.

There are two versions of the migration argument. The first is innocent: services are overstretched, new arrivals are visible, and the mental shortcut writes itself. That is a human reaction to a real condition, and it does not deserve contempt. The second is less innocent: the people running the country know the numbers, have known them for a decade, and have nonetheless found it convenient to keep pointing at the door rather than at the books. That deserves contempt. The party that was loudest about migration when the figure was 944,000 is making the same pitch now that the figure is 204,000. When the facts change and the argument does not, the argument was never about the facts.

So, if migration is not the cause, what is? Three structural decisions, made over forty years, underpin today’s predicament. Each is specific, measurable, and essential to solving the wider problem.

Where the money went

The cost-of-living crisis is not complicated. It is the predictable end-state of forty years of decisions made in plain sight. Three of them in particular. You can trace every line in your household budget to one of them.

The first is wages. The pattern set out earlier, 2.7% real growth a year for nearly three decades and then a flat line for fifteen, did not happen by accident. The bargaining power of workers was deliberately weakened, the share of national income going to capital rose at the expense of labour, and the tax system was rebuilt to reward owning over working. Productivity gains existed; they simply stopped flowing to the people producing them. The FTSE CEO pay number and the Rich List billions are not unrelated to the flat wage line on the next chart over. They are the same chart, viewed from the other side.

The second is privatisation. Britain sold public assets like water and rail, then rented them back. For example, water was sold in 1989 with no debts attached; now, the privatised water companies have accumulated £64 billion in debt and paid out £78-85 billion in dividends. Thames Water paid £131.2 million in dividends in March 2024, was fined £122.7 million by Ofwat in 2025, and operates more than half its treatment plants below standard capacity. Rail subsidies before privatisation were about £1.7 billion a year, but by 2017-18 they had risen to £5.3 billion—a more than 200% real-terms increase—with fares now the highest in Europe. Energy companies collectively made about £125 billion in UK profits during the recent crisis, while 6.6 million households are in fuel poverty. These statistics show that privatisation has not produced competitive markets but rather privately owned monopolies, often with government backing.

The third is the tax system, which was designed for a more equal country. Income from working is taxed at 20%, 40%, or 45%, plus National Insurance. In contrast, capital gains from owning assets are taxed at 18% or 24%. This means that owning assets is taxed less than earning income from work. These lower rates benefit a small group: the top 5,000 people by capital gains take 54% of all such gains, while the top 5,000 by income receive just 2% of total income. Aligning capital gains tax rates with income tax, according to the IPPR, could raise about £90 billion over five years. Council Tax is based on outdated 1991 property values; as a result, a £3 million flat in Belgravia pays less, proportionally, than a terraced house in Burnley. A case for a land value tax instead is explored elsewhere in this series.

These are not isolated problems. They form a single system: wages were suppressed, public assets were sold, and the tax base was realigned to prevent correction. To restore balance, all must be addressed together.

Twelve components, one argument

What follows is not an inventory. It is a programme, and the difference matters. A list of proposals can be cherry-picked, costed in isolation, and attacked one by one. A programme has a structural logic. You build the floor so people can participate. You fix the democracy so the government can govern. You change the ownership model, so essential services stop being cash machines for distant shareholders, you shift the tax base so the costs fall on wealth rather than work, and you invest in the productive economy that makes the whole thing sustainable. Each component is the load-bearing wall of a single building. You can argue about the construction order. You cannot remove the walls and keep the building. Each is set out in full in a sibling piece; the role of this section is to show how they fit together.

Begin with the floor. The NHS proved that collective provision of an essential service can work, and can be loved when it does. Universal Basic Services extends that logic to the other things people need to participate in a modern economy: housing, transport, training, food, childcare and broadband, provided directly rather than topped up with cash that gets captured by the markets people have to spend it in. UCL costs a starter package at around £42 billion in 2017, roughly £55 to £60 billion today, less than the country pays each year in interest on its debts, and worth more than £150 a week to the poorest households. A Floor That Holds works through the full design.

A floor on that scale will not be built by a parliament elected on a third of the vote. The 2024 election delivered Labour 411 seats, 63% of the Commons, on 33.7% of the vote. Reform won half a million more votes than the Liberal Democrats and ended up with 67 fewer seats. Every other component of this programme requires a political system capable of delivering it; the current one produces governments with the seats to do anything and the incentive to do almost nothing. Your Vote Doesn’t Count sets out a British design for a new voting system, including a replacement for the Lords.

Once the floor exists, the harder work of changing what the country owns becomes possible. The assets sold in the 1980s and 1990s were not built by the private sector; they were sold by the government, and they can be brought back. The principle has already been conceded. National Grid was re-nationalised in 2024, and Great British Railways is now being assembled. What is missing is the framework: a Public Ownership Act setting criteria for what must remain in public hands, and a sovereign wealth vehicle on the Norwegian or Singaporean model. Selling the Family Silver lays out the case, sector by sector.

The tax base has to move with it. The single change with the broadest cross-ideological support among economists, and the one politicians will not touch, is a tax on the value of land. Land cannot be relocated to Dublin. It cannot be hidden in a trust. It penalises land-banking and rewards development, and it works, at scale, in Denmark, Estonia and Singapore. It is the cleanest replacement for the absurdity of Council Tax based on 1991 valuations. The Tax That Can’t Run Away builds the argument out.

None of this happens if the political system continues to be quietly bought. The reason structural reform has not happened is not that it is technically impossible or economically unaffordable. It is the parties that would have to deliver it that depend on donations from the interests that benefit from things staying as they are. A donation cap, a ban on corporate and union spending, German-style state matching of small donations from real voters, and an Electoral Commission with the power to prosecute would change the incentives of every party at once. Cheap to Buy is, in some ways, the precondition for the rest: it explains why the others have not happened.

The wage question is not only a tax-and-transfer problem. It is a productivity problem, and the UK has one of the worst productivity records in the G7. A British Investment Bank at the scale of Germany’s KfW, procurement reform, statutory late-payment law, industrial energy contracts, apprenticeship reform and a public-interest test on foreign acquisitions of strategic firms would together rebuild the productive economy the right has spent forty years promising and failing to deliver. That is the argument of The Left Means Business.

The crisis is not evenly distributed. The places where it bites hardest have been managed for thirty years by a Whitehall that does not know them, with a Levelling Up programme that delivered a logo and a press conference. Genuine English devolution, two English parliaments along a Trent boundary with London as a third entity, is the constitutional answer, and Two Englands sets it out.

The crisis is also not finished. The next wave of automation will reshape work faster than any previous transition, and what is at stake is not whether that happens but who captures the gains. Sovereign compute, a National AI Service, a public data trust and a retraining guarantee are the components of treating AI as the infrastructure of the next century, the way electricity was the infrastructure of the last one. The 1945 analogy applies. The NHS was built when the country was broke, because healthcare was an infrastructure. Fully Automated, Fully Public makes the case.

The tax base shift has two additional components. Inheritance Tax is the most defensible tax in the system, and the one politicians are most cowardly about defending. It does not fall on the dead; it falls on the luck of who your parents were. A Tax on Luck is the reframing. Alongside it sits the annual question. When wealth is undertaxed, work has to be overtaxed, and the working majority pays more, so the asset-rich can pay less. A modest, well-designed annual levy on net wealth above a high threshold, of the kind operating in Norway, Switzerland and Spain, would correct the imbalance. The Wrong People Are Paying carries that argument.

The two most acutely felt costs in most households are housing and childcare. Housing Benefit costs the taxpayer more than £20 billion a year and, in the end, goes to landlords. Over any ten-year horizon, building council houses at the scale of the 1960s is cheaper than subsidising rents, because at the end of it, the country has an asset rather than a richer landlord. Houses, Not Subsidies works through this comparison. Childcare has become the largest single budget line for many young families, often exceeding the mortgage. Free provision from nine months, of the kind Scandinavia has been running for thirty years, pays for itself within a decade through the additional earnings of parents who can then return to work. The Bill Before the Mortgage closes the loop.

That is the programme. Twelve components, one argument. The structural causes are known, the fixes are designed, and every component exists, working, tested, at scale, in at least one other country comparable to Britain. Affordability is not the question. The question is why it has not happened.

Three objections, three answers

The first objection is that this costs too much. Name the number. The starter version of UBS costs around £55 to £60 billion a year. CGT alignment alone raises around £90 billion over five years. On its own arithmetic, the reform is affordable. The more important point is the counter-cost. The current system already spends £20 billion a year subsidising private landlords through Housing Benefit. It spends multiples of the permanent rate on NHS agency staff because the training pipeline was never funded. It pays for long-term unemployment that retraining would have prevented, and for the A&E admissions that follow from a social care system that does not work. Two fiscal realities are on the table. One is the current one. The choice is not really whether to afford the programme; it is whether to keep paying, year after year, the cost of not having it.

The second objection is that you cannot reverse privatisation. The assets were not built by the private sector; they were sold by the government, and what was sold can be bought back. The principle has already been accepted in the cases of National Grid and the railways. Norway runs a sovereign wealth fund worth more than $1.7 trillion; Singapore does the same through Temasek, and Britain has the embryo of a similar vehicle in the National Wealth Fund. The hardest part is not the mechanics. It is decided to do it.

The third objection is that Britain does not do big government. That is a statement about present political culture, not an iron law. The country that built the NHS, the post-war housing programme and the welfare state in five years, after six years of total war and an effective bankruptcy, was the same country in the same political tradition. The Attlee government delivered more structural reform in one parliament than most have managed in a generation. The “Britain does not do this” objection, applied retroactively, would have killed every reform that defines what is good about modern British life.

There is one more objection, and it is harder to answer with an argument because it is not an argument. It is a description of what happens next.

The mechanism

Reform UK has been polling at a sustained 27-28% through May 2026, peaking at 34% the previous September. Its programme has not been updated since net migration fell from 944,000 to 204,000. It is offering the same pitch and explanation it offered when the numbers were nearly five times higher. The energy it is harvesting is real; the diagnosis is wrong, and the prescription that follows is worse than wrong.

When mainstream parties fail to address the material conditions of ordinary lives, the political energy does not disappear. It migrates toward whoever offers the most compelling story about who is to blame, whether or not the story is true. The 2024 European Parliament elections returned far-right groupings to 27% of seats, the highest share ever recorded. The Alternative for Germany rose from 11.3% to 24.1% in a single parliamentary cycle. The National Rally in France rose from 1.39% to 21.66%. Seven European Union member states now have far-right parties in government or supporting governments from outside: Italy, Hungary, Slovakia, Finland, the Netherlands, Croatia and Austria. No longer an anomaly. A pattern.

The comparison that hovers here is the 1930s, and it requires precision. The mechanism does not depend on that analogy. It depends only on Italy in 2024, France in 2024, the Netherlands in 2023, and Hungary since 2011. Recent, specific, complete. Mainstream parties fail to address structural cost-of-living and inequality. A party emerges that offers a story about who is to blame. It gains power and implements policies that, in every concrete case, reward the wealthy, deregulate finance, weaken unions, and roll back environmental and labour standards. Inequality increases. The search for scapegoats intensifies. The cycle continues.

What Reform’s programme actually is, when you read it rather than its leader’s interviews, is tax cuts skewed to the top, deregulation of financial services, hostility to unions, and rollback of environmental protections. It is the same structural decisions that produced the conditions diagnosed in this piece, under different flags. The argument here is not that Reform is uniquely dangerous, although the scapegoating they trade in has real human costs. The argument is that a government pledged to accelerate inequality is not a fix for inequality. It is a guarantee of a longer and harder road to the same problem.

The window between mainstream parties failing and a far-right party arriving in office is the window for a genuine alternative. The parties that could plausibly fill it, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Greens, are circling the edges of this programme without committing to it. That is the problem this series is trying to solve, by setting out, in full, what such a commitment would actually look like.

The door is still open

I am not pretending any of this is easy. The interests that benefit from the current settlement are powerful, well-organised and well-funded. But the country knows something is wrong, and that knowledge is itself a political resource.

Everything in this series exists somewhere. The childcare model is in Scandinavia. Proportional democracy is widespread in Western Europe. The sovereign wealth fund is in Norway. The land value tax is working in Estonia and Singapore. The publicly run railway, cheaper and more reliable than ours, is in France, Germany and Japan. None of those places is a utopia; they each have their own problems. But they made choices decades ago that show up today as stable services, liveable costs, and governments that can still get things done. We made different choices. We can make different ones again.

The party currently harvesting the energy that should belong to that programme has no interest in delivering it. What it is offering is the same structural decisions that produced the problem, under different flags. The argument for acting now is not that the moment is ideal. The argument is that the moment exists at all. The 1997 window closed because Labour won and no longer needed it. The 2010 window closed because the Conservatives won outright at the next opportunity. The window opens when the parties capable of closing it are uncertain how to win under the existing rules. It is open now, but it won’t stay open.

This piece began with a feeling. Services were worse, bills were higher, and a deal was quietly repriced upward while the cheap option was abolished. The feeling is real. The numbers behind it are real. The cause is not the one you have been told. It is a set of structural decisions taken in plain sight over forty years, and it can be undone the same way it was done, deliberately, by a government that knows what it is for.

The door is open. It will not stay open indefinitely. That is not a counsel of despair; it is the reason to act now, while acting is still possible.