It is a simple question – and it will be at the heart of the general election campaign. After 14 years of Conservative government, people are asking: am I any better off?

Hilary Osborne www.theguardian.com 

Incomes

The answer for most people is – no, you are not better off. Pay has fallen in real terms – that is when inflation, including housing costs, has been taken into account. From 2010-2019, pay across the UK fell by 0.1% a year. Things have improved since the start of the pandemic, but workers are earning thousands of pounds less than they would have been if earnings had risen with inflation.

The living wage – previously the minimum wage – has gone from £5.93 an hour for over-21s to £11.44. However, the Resolution Foundation said cuts to working-age benefits have offset the gains for many. It said, over the past 10 years, low-paid families with children in receipt of benefits had experienced next to no, or even negative, income growth.

The personal tax allowance – the bit that you can earn tax free each year – increased rapidly in the years of the Coalition, letting 3.4 million people on low incomes keep all of their earnings. But since 2021 the threshold has been frozen. That means people receiving pay rises have not felt as much benefit as they would have otherwise.

Despite cuts to national insurance this year, some people will still be worse off than if the thresholds had risen with inflation. When the chancellor announced the latest cut, the Resolution Foundation said anyone earning up to £19,000 would still be worse off. The biggest gainers, it said, were those earning £50,000.

Housing

Though some homeowners have seen huge gains in the value of their properties, it is harder than ever to get on the housing ladder.

In May 2010, the average price of a UK home was £169,162, according to the Nationwide Building Society. In April this year, it was £261,962.

Although the market was sluggish in many parts of the country for several years after the 2008 banking crisis, in London, low interest rates pushed up values. Prices had started rising everywhere before the pandemic and, after a brief period where the housing market was closed, the race for space and a stamp duty holiday added fuel to the fire.

Low interest rates helped many pay off their mortgages and, in the last English Housing Survey, covering 2022-23, 35% of households were outright owners while 29% had mortgages. In 2010, more people had mortgages than owned outright.

However, the cost of a mortgage has gone from record lows – some borrowers were able to lock in for two years at below 1% – to rates not seen since before 2008.

Those not already on the housing ladder face a huge struggle to buy a home. According to Nationwide’s chief economist, Robert Gardner, a typical first-time buyer home now costs 5.2 times a buyer’s earnings, up from 4.6 in 2010. Monthly repayments are now 39% of homeowners’ take-home pay – “that’s quite a bit above the long-run average”, he says. For most of the past 14 years, it was running at 29.30%, but rising interest rates have changed that.

The target of building 300,000 homes a year has not been met.

Children and young people

The past 14 years have been bleak. Within weeks of getting into power, the Conservatives scrapped child trust funds – Gordon Brown’s scheme to help families build up savings for their children. Children had been given payments of at least £250 to be saved until they turned 18. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has found that the accounts made a big difference to the wealth of 18-year-olds, though with average savings of £650, it said this was unlikely to have affected whether they could afford higher education or a deposit for a home.

In January 2013, the government changed the child benefit system so higher income families no longer got the payments.

In England, tuition fees were capped at £3,290. In December 2010, the coalition government tripled the cap to £9,000, which students started paying in September 2012. Since 2017, it has been £9,250.

Childcare costs have gone up faster than inflation: according to the charity Coram, across Great Britain, the average price of 50 hours of childcare for a child under two was £285 a week in 2023, more than 30% higher than a decade ago.

Childcare vouchers were replaced by tax-free childcare in 2017, but many parents are missing out, said Laura Suter, director of personal finance at advice firm AJ Bell. Government spending has been less than half expected. She says many people are put off by the name of the scheme.

Older people

Older people, particularly women, have seen their incomes increase thanks to the new state pension and the “triple lock”, which was introduced by the coalition government to ensure state pensions keep up with inflation and earnings.

However, Helen Morrissey, head of retirement analysis at the financial firm Hargreaves Lansdown, said data shows that after housing costs, and with inflation taken into account, pensioners received £387 a week in 2022/23, compared with £371 a week in 2010. “This is not an enormous increase over the time period,” she said.

Older people are the most likely to have accrued savings, and for many years they did not earn much interest on them. According to Moneyfacts, in 2010, the average easy access savings rate on £10,000 was 0.78%. Interest rate rises mean that’s now at 3.11%. Those saving will feel better off because of recent rate rises, but borrowers will not.

Bills

Council tax bills have gone up, but central government funding cuts mean many bill payers are getting less for their money. In 2010-11, the average bill for a band D property in England was £1,439. This year, it is £2,171.

However, between 2010-11 and 2019-20, the amount local authorities spent on all services fell by 10.4%. The miles covered by bus routes fell by 14% and a third of England’s libraries closed.

Food prices went down for several years as discounters opened more shops in the UK and forced existing supermarkets to embark on cost-cutting. Official figures show prices dropped in 2014, 2015 and 2016. There were also drops during the pandemic. That trend has reversed – in spring last year, prices peaked at more than 19%.

Electricity bills had been fairly stable until the last couple of years. The average spend on electricity was £451 a year in 2010, and £1,274 last year, while gas went up from £520 to £1,304.

Rapid increases in prices in 2021 led to many suppliers collapsing and the disappearance of most of the cheapest tariffs.

Research by the Centre for Economic Performance at LSE suggests that Brexit has contributed to other cost pressures. In a report published last May, it said the cost of Brexit to each household was £250 when only considering the impact on food since December 2019.

A House of Commons Library report shows that, over the past three years, headline inflation has been higher in the UK than in France.

Raw sewage was discharged at nearly half of England’s 72 Blue Flag beaches last year, i analysis reveals.

[Including Exmouth, Sidmouth and Seaton]

Tom Bawden inews.co.uk

Blue Flag status indicates, among other things, that “no industrial, waste-water or sewage-related discharges should affect the beach area”.

But in total, water companies released waste into the sea around Blue Flag areas on at least 2,101 occasions over a total period of 14,834 hours in 2023.

Water companies are allowed to release sewage through “storm overflows” during periods of heavy rain, but campaigners have criticised the dumping of waste at sites designated as safe for swimming.

Meadfoot Beach near Torquay had the longest period of sewage discharge, totaling 2,003 hours through 140 dumps, according to the Top of the Poops sewage monitoring site, based on data from the water companies.

Exmouth Beach, which has been awarded Blue Flag status six years in a row, came next, with 214 sewage dumps over 1,983 hours, followed by Torre Abbey Sands in Torquay, with 190 dumps over 1,682 hours.

Environmental activist Feargal Sharkey said i‘s analysis was “yet another illustration of the utter devastation and contempt water companies are showing towards their customers and society”.

“Blue Flags are awarded on the basis that here’s a guide that you can take your family over the bank holiday weekend and safe in the knowledge that your kids will be safe,” Mr Sharkey said.

“But hidden behind the presentation of a Blue Flag beach, your children are potentially actually paddling and swimming in their own waste. And it’s only because of the recent ruckus and all of this being dragged out into the public scrutiny that people are now becoming aware of it.”

He added: “Kier Starmer’s very insightful reference to the state of our rivers and sea yesterday was greeted with applause and enthusiasm.

“Now we need to ensure that any new government will carry out an immediate root and branch review – not only of the ownership, funding and structure of the water industry, but the operation, structure and funding of its regulatory oversight system because both have failed both the environment and the consumer.”

Asked if that includes blue flag beaches, he said: “You better believe it – all of it should be up for grabs and it all needs to be reviewed in the first 100 days and a matter of some urgency.”

Water companies are allowed to use “storm overflows” to discharge waste during periods of heavy rain to stop their systems from getting overwhelmed and sewage backing up into people’s homes.

But people are becoming increasingly angry about the number of times sewage is being dumped into the sea and want to see the sewage system upgraded.

A total of 20 of the 33 Blue Flag sites where sewage was released had 30 discharges or more last year. Nine Blue Flag beaches had more than 100 sewage discharges.

Jo Bateman – a keen swimmer – is so frustrated by the pollution around Exmouth beach that she is taking South West Water to court.

A retired physiotherapist, the 62-year-old is claiming compensation, saying she was unable to swim at Exmouth Beach for ten days in 2023 because of raw sewage being discharged into the sea.

“When I first started swimming in Exmouth in 2018, I was completely ignorant of the water pollution problem caused by South West Water’s sewage discharges into the Exe estuary and off the beach,” she said.

“As time has gone by, I’ve learned more and more about what’s happening. It’s unacceptable. I’m [taking SWW) to court this because I feel they need to be held to account and made to take full responsibility for the harm they’re causing – not just to me but to all water users, to the environment, and to the tourism industry.

“I hope to set a legal precedent that will open the floodgates for the many people like me who have been affected by the unacceptable actions of the water companies. It would be amazing to see them rise up and take action,” she said.

John Halsall, Chief Operating Officer at South West Water, said: “Like all our customers, including Ms Bateman, we care deeply about the quality of our region’s bathing waters… Exmouth beach has maintained an ‘excellent’ bathing water quality status since 2016.”

The Blue Flag scheme is an international quality mark which is run in England by Keep Britain Tidy and tests the quality of bathing water at least every 30 days.

A spokesperson for Keep Britain Tidy said they are awarded on the basis of water quality testing that is carried out, independently, by the Environment Agency at all designated bathing beaches during the bathing season – which runs between May and September.

“The Environment Agency advises us which beaches have met the international Blue Flag standard for bathing water quality, based on the EU Bathing Water Directive, at the beach,” it said.

Other English beaches that are most affected include Avon Beach, in the coastal town of Mudeford, to the east of Bournemouth, which had 165 sewage dumps last year over 1,657 hours and Beachlands Central on Hayling Island in Hampshire, with 163 dumps over 1,286 hours.

In the North of England, Whitley Bay had 52 dumps lasting 148 hours and Seaburn Beach near Sunderland had 43 discharges over 136 hours.

Analysis of raw data for Blue Flag beaches in Scotland and Wales is less comprehensive and up-to-date than for England.

Scotland does not have a Blue Flag scheme but it does operate its own award, known as the Scottish Beach awards.

An analysis by the Scottish Liberal Democrats, based on data for 2022, found that sewage was dumped onto those beaches at least 411 times that year.

Peterhead Lido, which is situated on the east coast, north of Aberdeen, saw the most releases, with 337 discharges over 483 hours in 2022. And last year, sewage was dumped on 205 occasions, the longest of which lasted 28 hours, according to Scottish Water.

In Wales, a pumping station about a mile downstream of Poppit Sands beach in northern Pembrokeshire – as the River Teifi enters the sea – discharged sewage 130 times over 2,592 hours in 2023, according to data from Welsh Water.

A Water UK spokesperson said: “The quality of our bathing waters has been transformed in recent years. There are nearly seven times as many beaches classed as ‘excellent’ since 1990 and 90 per cent of bathing waters are now rated as ‘good’ or ‘excellent’.

“We recognise however that the current levels of sewage spills are still unacceptable. Companies want to invest £11 billion – a tripling on current levels – to reduce spills in bathing waters by nearly two-thirds by 2030.”

Blue Flag beach criteria

The Keep Britain Tidy website lists a series of criteria for a Blue Flag beach, saying the award shows “locals and visitors they have arrived at a clean, safe and beautiful beach”.

The criteria includes:

• No industrial, waste-water or sewage-related discharges should affect the beach area
• The beach must achieve ‘excellent’ water quality as set out in the Bathing Water Directive
• If appropriate, an adequate number of lifeguards and/or lifesaving equipment must be available at the beach
• First aid equipment must be available on the beach
• A supply of drinking water should be available at the beach
• Wheelchair access and accessibility features must be in place for at least one Blue Flag beach in each municipality
• Bins must be available at the beach and they must be regularly emptied
• Facilities for the separation of recyclable waste materials should be available at the beach
• Toilet facilities must be provided
• The toilet or restroom facilities must be kept clean
• There should be no unauthorised camping, driving or dumping of waste on the beach
• During the bathing season dogs must be excluded from the award area of the beach

An Environment Agency spokesperson said 96 per cent of bathing sites meet minimum water quality standards – up from just 76 per cent in 2010.

“We are also strengthening our regulation and working with the water sector, farmers, industry, and others to improve our bathing waters for all.”

Sian Williams, head of operations Natural Resources Wales said: “We remain absolutely committed to improving water quality in our rivers and coastal waters for both people and nature.

“We understand the concern of many across Wales that overflows are still operating too frequently, and we continue to push water companies to improve their performance and reduce spill numbers.”