Which British nation has fared the worst since 2010?

England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have all suffered – but the pain has not been shared uniformly. Ollie Corfe reports

The exact date of the general election may be unclear but, if the polls are to be believed, the Conservatives will be severely punished after 14 years in government.

Across the UK as a whole, the party consistently trails Labour by 20 points. But the party is viewed in an even dimmer light outside England. They are a handful of points ahead of Reform and Plaid Cymru in Wales, with 17pc of the vote; in Scotland they are in a distant third place behind Labour and the SNP on 13pc, according to the latest YouGov survey.

Since 2010, the tax burden has grown substantially and real wages have fallen. The NHS is struggling, there’s an acute housing shortgage and the roads are littered with potholes.

But how accurate are the polls and how much of this can be blamed on

The Troubles, a peripheral geographic position and a high concentration of low productivity industries have been identified as causes of Northern Ireland’s persistent economic woes. A decade ago, the median annual full-time salary was £24,000. Workers in every other UK nation and English region could have expected to earn more at the time.

That is no longer the case. Between 2013 and 2023, wage growth in Northern Ireland – at 37.1pc – outpaced that of the other parts of the UK. According to the 2023 Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE), the median annual the Conservatives? How have the other nations of Britain fared under Labour and the SNP?

Over the years since devolved powers were bestowed upon Holyrood, Cardiff and Stormont in 1999, the country has become ever more politically and legislatively divided. Austerity, Brexit, the pandemic and the soaring cost of living has put the cleavages between national governments into sharp relief.

Not one has a clean record as of 2024: the Scottish Parliament is cranking up taxes on the hardest workers, NHS Wales has lost track of its A&E waiting times data ( let alone the emergency room targets themselves), productivity in Northern Ireland continues to lag behind the rest and home ownership is beyond the reach of most families in England. But which British nation has fared best? pay had risen to just under £33,000 – more than in Wales, the North East, the West Midlands and Yorkshire and the Humber.

HMRC figures suggest the employment rate – the percentage of working age adults who have a job – reached a record high of 72.8pc between August and October last year. The unemployment rate fell to a record low of 2.1pc over the same period.

England posted the worst performance. Its incomes grew 28.2pc, making it the only UK nation where real wages fell, after taking into account cumulative inflation.

Not all devolved governments have taken control of taxation. While National Insurance rates remain consistent across the realm, income tax varies considerably between Scotland and the rest of the UK.

Wales has had powers to set rates since 2019, but has thus far remained in lockstep with Westminster. Stormont has been able to change Northern Ireland’s rate of corporation tax since 2015, but income tax rate setting responsibilities are still being negotiated. Since the Scotland Act 2016, however, the SNP has ratcheted up the burden on high-earning Scots.

A resident of England, Wales or Northern Ireland on the cusp of the top decile of earners, on £70,000, in the 2024/25 tax year, would have a tax liability of slightly less than £15,500. In Scotland, measures introduced in December mean they would pay £2,000 more.

The margin widens further on very high incomes.

An effective tax rate is the ratio of income tax paid to pre-tax earnings. In the 2013/14 financial year, all UK citizens earning £150,000 faced an effective rate of income tax of 35.7pc.

This burden has risen more than 4 points to 39.8 pc in Scotland, but by 0.1 points elsewhere.

Housing costs are the largest single expense for UK families.

Faced with stratospheric private rents and falling mortgage rates, a flurry of activity is under way as first-time buyers desperate to get on the property ladder try to enter the market.

Scottish households are the best placed to make this leap. Affordability – defined as the ratio of the average house price to median full-time annual earnings – better captures the accessibility of housing than asking prices alone. The gap between asking prices and wage growth between 2013 and 2023 was smallest north of the border. Scotland’s affordability ratio was 4.7 a decade ago, worsening slightly to 5.2 today.

In England, by comparison, this the ration leapt from 6.6 to 8.6.

Ahead of the last general election, the Conservatives pledged to add 300,000 homes a year to the nation’s housing stock by the mid-2020s.

This target is far from being met, with just 234,000 built in 2022, driving prices ever higher.

Property prices n Northern Ireland went up more than anywhere else, according to the Office for National Statistics – from £102,000 to £179,500 a rise of more than 76pc.

In 1999 the devolved authorities were conferred wide-ranging control over their healthcare systems, from spending to organisation, family planning, prevention and treatment. The uniqueness and complexity of each nation makes them tricky to compare, but all share a similar A&E waiting time target – namely that 95pc of new patients should spend less than four hours from arrival to admission, transfer or discharge.

NHS Wales and Northern Ireland’s Health and Social Care department did not meet the goal at any point in the past decade. In fact, the data show more than half of patients endured a sub-standard wait in Northern Ireland in every month since June 2022.

Between 2012 and 2023, the annual average proportion of patients at major A&E departments taken care of within four hours in Wales fell by 30.7 points, from 87pc to 56.5pc – a steeper decline than anywhere else in Britain. England suffered too, with its rate falling by 24.3pc, but from a higher baseline of 95.4pc. Life expectancy at birth for those born in Wales made the leanest gains of all UK regions between 2009 and 2019 – increasing by 14 months whereas England’s increased by 18 months.