Our economy is too reliant on household debt and ever-rising property prices, and needs to transition from short-term and too narrow a focus on the finance sector to investment-led growth. It also has an unsustainable imbalance between imports and exports. Many sectors suffer from low productivity, low wages, and poor quality and insecure jobs; we need to move away from overly flexible labour markets and get better at adopting new technologies. Many sectors are also highly concentrated, so we need to embrace open markets.

Health inequalities are driven more by social determinants of health (income, work, housing, education and so on) than by behaviours, genetics or differences in care. Health inequalities have grown since the publication of the first Marmot review in 2010. People can expect to spend more of their lives in poor health; improvements in life expectancy have stalled, and have actually declined for the poorest 10% of women. The health gap between wealthy and deprived areas has grown over that period, but there are additional regional inequalities; for example, people living in a deprived area of the North East suffer worse outcomes than people living in a similarly deprived area in London, so much so that their life expectancy is nearly five years less.

People who live in the most deprived areas of England suffer from lower quality NHS care than people in the least deprived areas. For example, they spend longer in A&E and have a worse experience of making a GP appointment. However, the ‘inequality gap’ has narrowed in several areas, such as unplanned hospital admissions for asthma, diabetes and epilepsy in children, recovery rates following psychological therapy and people being able to die at their usual place of residence.

A new national funding formula introduced by the Department for Education in 2018/19 has contributed to a shift in the balance of funding from more deprived schools to less deprived schools. Although more deprived areas and schools still receive more per-pupil funding than those that are less deprived, the difference in funding has narrowed. Between 2017-18 and 2020-21, average per-pupil funding in the most deprived fifth of schools fell in real terms by 1.2%, while per-pupil funding in the least deprived fifth increased by 2.9%.

People who live in ‘left behind’ neighbourhoods (such as coastal communities and on the outskirts of post-industrial towns and cities) are disconnected from town and city centres as well as access to essential services. This is due to a combination of low levels of car ownership - making them more reliant on public transport - and poor quality and availability of public transport. Local authority-supported bus services in these areas have declined by 35% in six years, while commercial bus services have declined by 11% over the same timeframe.