UK Societal Resilience · August 2026
A stress reading from 0 to 100. Higher means more stress; 0 is calm, 100 is crisis.
robust range 45–52 under alternative methods
A single measured reading across eleven national systems. The United Kingdom is fragile, and has risen 1 point since the previous release.
Medium · 71 of 73 indicators verified
Release movements
What changed this release
Key deteriorations
| Metric | Domain | Score | Movement | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Drug-poisoning deaths | Population Health | 93 | +42 pts | 0.90 |
| Rent to income ratio | Housing and Household Formation | 52 | +36 pts | 0.80 |
| Suicide rate | Population Health | 91 | +29 pts | 0.85 |
| Common mental-health condition prevalence | Population Health | 84 | +23 pts | 0.75 |
| Air pollution (PM2.5) | Environment and Climate | 33 | +22 pts | 0.85 |
Key improvements
| Metric | Domain | Score | Movement | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Public sector net borrowing | Fiscal Resilience | 31 | −41 pts | 0.90 |
| Storm overflow spill duration (England) | Environment and Climate | 23 | −39 pts | 0.80 |
| Current budget deficit | Fiscal Resilience | 30 | −34 pts | 0.85 |
| Headroom against fiscal rules | Fiscal Resilience | 32 | −33 pts | 0.70 |
| Real average weekly earnings growth | Living Standards | 38 | −32 pts | 0.85 |
Scores are stress readings out of 100; higher means more stress. Most indicators update annually or quarterly, so a large movement usually marks a new official release entering the index, not a change that happened within the month.
11 systems · measured
Each national system, on one scale
Each figure is a stress score from 0 to 100. Higher means more stress, so the most stressed systems sit at the top.
Weighting
What drives the headline figure
The headline is a weighted reading across all systems. This shows which carry the most weight once their stress score and domain weight are combined.
Historical trajectory
National stress, 2010–present
National trajectory
British Resilience Index · Historical Trend
Current
52Level-only modelled trajectory from verified official statistics; all 11 domains in this view are covered from 2018 (sparser before 2015). Each year's published values are re-scored on today's scale: it shows where stress sat, not a live historical index, and the current headline additionally reflects short-term trend and volatility, so it can differ from the final plotted point. COVID-era stress appears mainly from 2021, as the waiting-list, housing and court pressures it triggered entered the annual statistics with a lag.
Systemic risk
Systemic Risk Penalty
No systemic risk penalty applied this release; fewer than three domains are in the Critical band. The penalty activates when three or more domains simultaneously reach Critical (+5 pts) or Crisis (+10 pts), reflecting the increased probability that concurrent failures become self-reinforcing.
Go deeper
Deep dives into the data
Beyond the headline score, we take single official datasets and follow one topic all the way down: who, where, how much, and which way it is moving. A few to start with:
How the four hour standard has slipped to 76 per cent, the rise in 12 hour waits, and the worst trusts.
7,278,384 referral to treatment pathways were waiting at the end of May 2026, around 6.2 million individual patients, with 65.6 per cent within 18 weeks against a 92 per cent standard last met in September 2015, and 104,734 waits of more than a year.
How the price of a home has climbed over thirty years, how far it varies between places, and where West Lothian sits.
What share of children grow up in a low income family, by local authority and nation, how much housing costs add, and where West Lothian sits.
How many households cannot keep warm at a reasonable cost, by region and local authority, and how the measure has changed since 2010.
A British Resilience Index analysis ranking English local authorities on fuel poverty, child low income and drug deaths together, to show where the deepest hardship overlaps.
How many years of pay a home costs in every local authority: 7.63 times typical earnings in England, down from the 2021 peak but more than double the 1997 ratio.
134,210 households, including 176,130 children, were living in temporary accommodation on 31 December 2025, down slightly from the record set the previous quarter, the first quarterly fall since 2022, but still up 5.0 per cent on a year earlier.
The storm overflow record: how often each water company spills, into which rivers, and whether it is getting better or worse.
The average Band D bill at 2,392 pounds and up 4.9 per cent, how it has climbed since 1993, where bills are highest and lowest, and who raised them most this year.
Your area
Find your council
Every English upper tier council has a sourced profile: children's services, temporary accommodation, school absence, deprivation and financial pressure, each figure traced to its official dataset.
The monthly reading
Follow the number over time
A single reading is a snapshot. The value is in the direction of travel. Once a month we send the new national score, what moved, and the sharpest findings from the data, with every figure traceable to its official source.
Data provenance
71 of 73 indicators are drawn from verified official sources, each labelled on its metric card. The remaining 2 are provisional placeholders, marked as seed where they appear, because no clean official figure is published yet; placeholders are shown for transparency and are excluded from all scoring.