Living Standards

How many households cannot keep warm at a reasonable cost, by region and local authority, and how the measure has changed since 2010.

Britain publishes the gambling industry quarterly to the penny, and cannot agree how many adults are harmed by it: two sets of official statistics differ sixfold and an independent review says a third of the gap is unexplained. It has counted 21 gambling related suicides ever, none since 2016, records gambling nowhere in its insolvency statistics, and publishes no NHS waiting times or outcomes. When the NHS came to spend the new levy it declined to use the prevalence data at all.

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.

Food inflation has fallen from a peak of 19.1 per cent to 1.7 per cent, but the price level is still 38.3 per cent above January 2020 and has never come back down, with oils and fats up 75.3 per cent and the poorest tenth of households spending 14 per cent of their budget on food against 8 per cent for the richest.

The Ofgem price cap since 2019, the Energy Price Guarantee crisis peak, and a record 5.02 billion pounds of household energy debt and arrears.

No VAT on household electricity from 1 October 2026 to 31 March 2027, worth around £45 off the yearly cap. The £1,723 October bill taken apart into Ofgem's cost allowances, who gets the VAT cut and who does not, and the £14bn to £18.5bn levy path on OBR figures.

126,281 people in England and Wales entered a formal insolvency procedure in 2025, one in 395 adults, how the mix has shifted away from bankruptcy, and where rates are highest.

8.3 million people on Universal Credit in Great Britain, how the caseload has more than tripled since 2019, who is in paid work, and where local claimant rates are highest and lowest.

The state pension costs about 146.1 billion pounds in 2025-26 for 13.2 million recipients, rising to 180.7 billion by 2030-31, while DWP estimates about 2.1 billion pounds of means tested Pension Credit went unclaimed in the year to March 2024.

UK welfare spending at about 333.8 billion pounds in 2025-26, heading to 408.6 billion by 2030-31 on DWP forecasts, the State Pension the biggest line and disability benefits the fastest growing at 44 per cent.

New style Jobseeker's Allowance pays 95.55 pounds a week for up to 182 days whatever you earned; Germany pays 60 per cent of previous net pay (67 with a child) for six to 24 months. The rules side by side, two worked examples at UK wages, what each system costs, the OECD comparison across seven countries, and the earnings related benefit Britain paid from 1966 to 1982.