BRITAIN’S economy is plummeting and lacking resilience to future shocks with inadequate responses by Establishment political parties, research published today shows.

The Democracy Collaborative’s UK Index of Systemic Trends charts the health of Britain’s political economy across indicators including economic growth, inequality, poverty, financialisation, life expectancy, productivity, environmental degradation and trust in government, revealing it fails on all metrics.

From 2015 to 2024, average economic growth was just 0.8 per cent per capita, it found, while, child poverty has risen to 30.5 per cent — up 122.6 per cent since 1970.

Housing costs are at their highest in 50 years, with private renters paying about 28.1 per cent of their income on housing in 2023, a 198.9 per cent rise since 1970.

Regional inequality is stark, with someone living in London effectively inhabiting an economy equivalent to Switzerland, while for someone in the East Midlands it is closer to Poland.

The Democracy Collaborative president Joe Guinan said the Index showed Britain was not “ungovernable but misgoverned, based on the attachment of the political class to a half-century-old economic model that serves the few at the expense of the many.”

He said: “Use this index to measure the actual commitments of politicians promising to do things differently.”

Leading author Professor Howard Reed said the data sets out the “full extent of the economic and social crisis that the UK finds itself in after five decades of Thatcherite and post-Thatcherite policies,” adding that on a whole range of indicators Britain was “doing a lot worse than it was the last time these arguments were raised.”

On the private renting data, Generation Rent chief executive Ben Twomey said: “Homes are the foundations of our lives, but high rents stretch our wages so thin that there’s often nothing left at the end of each month.

“Trying to save money while renting is like pushing a boulder up a hill that keeps getting steeper and steeper.

“This report shows that soaring rents have become a fact of life, but it didn’t always used to be this way, and it must not continue.”

He called for urgent action on the cost of rent to “make sure even more renters don’t spiral into poverty, debt and homelessness.”