National accounts of failure · United Kingdom
Britain is a system.
The system is jammed.
You cannot afford a home. You cannot see a doctor. Wages have not grown in fifteen years. These are not separate stories. They are one machine, and the binding constraint is planning.
Vital signs
What it feels like. What it measures.
Click a row to open the domain. Every figure has a source on the domain page.
| Lived | Official | Figure |
|---|---|---|
| Can't afford a home | Housing backlog | 4.3M homes short |
| Can't see a doctor | NHS waiting list | 6.2M patients |
| Wages not growing | Productivity gap | 20% below USA |
| Young people leaving | Graduate emigration | ↑84% since 2010 |
| Wealth fleeing too | Millionaire exodus | 16,500 in 2025 |
| Future looks bleak | Fertility rate | 1.41 (lowest ever) |
| Taxes up, services down | Debt interest | £111B/year |
| Everything costs more | Infra premium | 10× Spain (metro/mile) |
The diagnosis
One disease. Two causes.
Successive governments blocked supply with a 1947 planning system while turbocharging demand through record immigration. The maths was never going to work.
The 1947 Town and Country Planning Act made building anything a political decision. Result: 4-year consent times vs 1-2 years in Europe. Everything costs more, takes longer, or never gets built.
Net migration peaked at 906k in 2023. Cameron promised “tens of thousands” in 2010. Johnson dropped the target entirely. Both parties chose demand-side subsidies (Help to Buy) over supply-side reform.
How planning dysfunction cascades through every domain:
The Vicious Cycle
How planning dysfunction cascades through the entire system
The doom loop:
Can't build → Housing crisis → Young leave → Fertility falls → Tax base shrinks → Services cut → More leave
Without reform, OBR projects debt reaching 270% of GDP by 2070
The treatment
Three priorities. In order.
Britain's problems are interconnected, but the fix has a clear sequence. Get planning right and everything else becomes possible.
Fix Planning
Replace the 1947 system with zonal rules. If it meets the code, it gets built. No more 4-year waits.
Build Homes
300,000 homes per year until the backlog clears. Prices fall. Young people stay.
Grow the Economy
More homes, cheaper energy, better transport. Productivity rises. Tax receipts follow.
This isn't wishful thinking. It's a sequenced roadmap with costed policies.
The other half of the work
Diagnosis is not the treatment.
This site maps the machine. The next two sites send people into it: a dispatch board for civic software, and a recruitment challenge for builders who want in.