The Cost-of-Living Crisis is Not Over - and Everyone is Feeling It

The crisis in voters’ own words

“The cost-of-living crisis has ended.” So said Andrea Leadsom, a minister in the Department of Health and Social Care, in late March 2024. Her words may come to haunt her. 

In this report, we show how far from the truth that triumphalist statement was. The cost-of-living crisis, far from over, is still painfully real for voters across Britain. 

Any examination of the official statistics will tell you this is true. While inflation is now 3.2%, the lowest it has been in two years, it follows the highest inflation levels Britain had seen in four decades. Moreover, while headline inflation has reduced, the actual cost of living continues to soar. Food price inflation, when last measured, was 7%. As a result, nearly half (44%) of Brits are buying less food in their regular shop and a quarter (25%) have run out of food in the past two weeks, unable to buy more. Household energy bills are still far higher than they were just a few years ago, and four in ten (41%) Brits are struggling to afford their payments. 

This is not another paper about statistics, however. Instead, this attempts to do something different. In January 2024, we commissioned Blue Marble, an independent social research agency, who conducted “listening” interviews with 21 pairs of swing voters across Britain. We wanted to know what the cost-of-living crisis feels like, not what it looks like in a spreadsheet. 

This report tells those voters’ stories, in their own words. Of the 42 who were kind enough to speak to us, a few also gave us permission to record their interviews and share them here. This report documents the reality of the cost-of-living crisis, as voters are experiencing it right now.

The Impact of the Crisis

“Everything’s gone up… it’s a struggle” 

We opened every interview with a single, simple question: “what are you most concerned about in the months ahead?” 

The answer was near universal: the cost of day-to-day life. While other issues have come to dominate the news headlines, there is only one story in most homes in Britain today: prices are rising and wages are flat.

Those who work in politics and the media tend to talk about the big picture: millions and billions, GDP growth and inflation figures. Voters’ experience of the economy is more real and tangible. It’s the additional pounds on every item in the supermarket, the hundreds added to the energy bill, and the thousands on top of the mortgage payment. 

Taken together, prices aren’t just rising, they are soaring. They are “sky high”. They are “extortionate”. They have “gone through the roof.” The shock is palpable. It’s “crazy”. More to the point, it’s “scary”. People don’t know “how they are going to be able to afford their day-to-day costs.” 

“Everyone seems skint”

Perhaps the most striking thing about the cost-of-living crisis is how many people have been dragged into it. People who were once living comfortable lives - weighing up whether to buy a new car this year, or where to go on the next holiday overseas - are now dragged into financial hardship. 

“I’ve never been in this situation in my life,” one respondent said. Another was incredulous that this could be happening to him and his partner: “This is absolutely ridiculous because we're both working full time, both in half decent jobs, and literally we're sitting with like 50, 60, 70 pounds at the end of the month. And I'm like, how is that?”

Cost-of-living crises used to be the kind of thing that happened to other people - like “your low earners and your single mums and people on benefits”. But now even “professional people” are struggling to get by. As one interviewee put it: “everyone seems skint”. 

“It’s all necessities - it’s not luxury items”

While it may have started with the luxuries, now every financial decision has to be weighed and measured. One person said that they feel they’ve “constantly got numbers going through my head.” Shopping, once a source of joy, has become “depressing”. 

Everyone is having to “save and scrimp”. And still, controlling spending is impossible. They’re not “buying Gucci handbags and spa treatments'' or “dining on champagne and truffles”. Instead, they are “saving and scrimping” just to pay for the “necessities” - “it’s something I never foresaw being so difficult”. Respondents are having to consider every single purchase, even those they would "never give a second thought to a few years ago.”

“I live like Scrooge. I just keep everything off.”

Every day, people are forced to make trade-offs between things they had previously never thought about. The most commonly cited example was choosing between “heating and eating” - either turning on the radiators or cooking a hot meal for the family. 

Almost everyone we spoke to was rationing their energy use in some way. Some were running the heating on a lower temperature. Others for a few hours a day or in only a single room in their house. A number took part in the interviews swaddled in additional jumpers and covered in blankets. One respondent put it memorably: “I live like Scrooge. I just keep everything off.” 

“The whoopsie aisle”

When trading off is impossible, everyone we spoke to was trading down. Many were switching to the budget supermarkets. Most were buying in bulk. A number were finding fresh fruit and vegetables too expensive and buying frozen instead. One memorably talked about shopping in the “whoopsie aisle”, where supermarkets sell food that is at its sell-by-date at a reduced price.

“We’re a third world country now”

The cost-of-living crisis might begin at home, but it doesn’t end at the front door. People’s sense of decline extends to their local communities. Crime is rising. Rubbish “lines the streets”. “Food banks” are evidence of societal failure. Local town centres have become row-upon-row of “vape shops” and “pound stretchers” interspersed with shuttered doors and windows. 

People describe their local area as “horrific” and, on a number of occasions, a “ghost town”. Few visit their local town or city-centre now, because “it is so depressing.” 

Many worry that their kids won’t feel the same sense of local pride in their area that they once had. Some are even encouraging them to emigrate and seek better lives elsewhere: “We’re a third world country now. I have said to my kids, you should really try and move to Australia or somewhere else now, because this country is done. We're doomed.”

“That’s middle ages that is”

To many voters, it feels like they have lost their future. It was a long held belief that if you work hard, you’ll earn a decent wage and get on in life. Now, such progress feels impossible. "You can't even see a future” said one. Instead, we are simply “going around in a circle”, “trapped in a vicious cycle”, living month-to-month. 

Some extended this to the country itself, suggesting that we are moving backwards in time. Talking of those unable to turn the heating on, and “gathering around a candle, trying to warm their hands”, one respondent put it pithily: “that’s middle ages, that is.”

How the Crisis Feels

“Take these big bosses and these members of parliament into any city, any town, and ask them on a Wednesday morning to go find a local food bank. And you'll see working families there - mums and dads that both work, with families that are struggling to put food on the table”.

The psychologist Jonathan Haidt has written extensively about the “values” that guide how we respond to moral questions, like those encountered in religion and politics. High amongst these is an inherent bias towards things that we perceive to be “fair”, and an aversion to things that appear “unfair”. 

In 2023, Haidt refined this further, breaking “fairness” into two parts. On the one hand, you have “equality”, which focuses on whether people receive equal treatment and equal outcomes, regardless of who they are. As Haidt notes, this is a value that is of particular concern to those who are politically left-leaning. On the other hand, you have “proportionality”, which focuses on whether individuals are rewarded in proportion to their contribution. This idea tends to be held by those who are on both the political left and right. 

There is clearly a sense that what is happening in Britain is a breach of “equality”. Many interviewees cited the vast inequality between those at the very top of the income bracket and the rest: “that rise between… the 1% and everybody else is getting bigger and bigger… And I just feel it’s so unfair.” The effect of the cost of living crisis on children is another example of this. It’s “not fair”, said one respondent: “kids not eating: it shouldn’t happen in this day and age.” 

However, the cost-of-living crisis is most often framed as a question of proportionality. There has always been inequality in society. To some degree, there always will be. What is so shocking about the cost-of-living crisis is that so many people, who seemed to be doing everything right, have been dragged into the mire. 

The quote that opens this section is an illustration of this, betraying shock that “working families” with “mums and dads that both work” have found themselves queuing up at food banks on a weekday morning. The same is true when our interviewees talked about the impact on the elderly. They have “worked all their life”, paying in for decades, only to find themselves “sitting at this age and having to think: “can I put the heating on?” 

The cost-of-living crisis feels so unfair because it has broken the idea that working hard is enough to protect us. 

“I find it really sad” 

The crisis summons a wide range of emotions from voters. 

To many, the dominant emotion is sadness. “It’s just sad, really, to see how everything’s deteriorated and gone downhill,” said one when asked how the situation made them feel. Another answered almost identically: “It’s sad, really, isnt it? You want to move forward and basically you're going backwards.”

To some, sadness turns to anger. To others, it leads to a very real sense of fear, about life today and particularly about the future. People describe being “scared” to put their heating on. Looking ahead, they “don’t know what’s going to happen.” One more financial hit - if “mortgage rates… go up again” for instance - would leave people “pretty screwed.” 

Who’s to Blame? 

“How did this happen?”  

Asked for the cause of the cost-of-living crisis, voters are unsure. Some mentioned Covid. A few, the war in Ukraine. The dominant answer, however, was simply incredulity. Voters cannot understand how a crisis on this scale could have happened in a country that was supposed to be one of the wealthiest in the world. On a number of occasions, our interviewees would despairingly ask the big, rhetorical question: “how did this happen?” 

Some voters blame big business for their situation, with particular ire focused on the energy companies, who are seen as having “taken advantage” of inflation to increase their own profit. People aren’t seeking to overturn capitalism, but they are troubled by the scale of profits that some companies have since announced: "Obviously, they should have profits in a business, but not the millions and millions and millions… when people are struggling".

To most, however, there was a clear sense that it is the Government who are to blame.

“All you’re doing is stabbing yourself in the back by voting for them” 

To most, however, there was one clear cause of their suffering: the Government. They are seen as having no “long term plan”. The cost-of-living crisis is “on their watch”. The long shadow of austerity - “cuts to every aspect of life” - still hangs over us all.  

“Robbing Peter to pay Paul”

Recent policies, such as the cut to National Insurance, received short shrift. Some hadn’t noticed it. Others noted that, with tax bands frozen, they were simply “robbing Peter to pay Paul”. Most saw it as an election ploy, expecting the government to reverse it after an election: “they just want to make these promises… and then it all gets twisted about.” 

“They're saying inflation has gone down. Where? What are they buying?!” 

This paper opened with a triumphalist line from a serving Minister, claiming that the cost-of-living crisis is over. Statements like these were met with incredulity by the voters we spoke to. As one voter put it, when confronted by the news that the Prime Minister was celebrating hitting his inflation target: “this is absolutely, profoundly disgusting right now. There's people like, for example, you and me have been having this conversation saying how much everything's gone up.” 

Another made the fundamental point, true of every voter across the country, that a falling rate of inflation does not mean that prices are coming down - in fact, quite the opposite: “That does not mean that I'm paying less on my electric or my gas. That doesn't mean that. I think people just want to see results in pounds in their pocket.” 

“We fight like tigers for our family” 

Throughout all of the interviews set out in this paper, one division cropped up repeatedly. The interviewees saw a nation that was divided in two. On one side was “us”, representing ordinary working people, often characterised as “people like us”, who have felt the cost-of-living crisis personally. On the other side, was another group, “them”, representing those in power, in both politics and business: “the people at the top”. “It’s been a real crisis for the country, unless you fall into a small bracket of really privileged people,” said one interviewee. 

Sometimes the group called “them” is presented as simply being ignorant of other people’s lives. More often, they are cast as being aware, but not caring: “they ain’t bothered are they, on a good wage?” said one; “they’re quite happy with the status quo because they are alright,” said another. 

The Conservatives, and Rishi Sunak in particular, fell foul of this. His personal wealth was regularly noted, the embodiment of the politician who “can’t tell you the price of a carton of milk” and whose promises should be treated with caution because he will “promise you the sun, the moon and the earth” and deliver nothing in return. 

Many of our interviewees saw themselves pitched in battle against the cost-of-living crisis. “We fight like tigers for our family”, said one woman while the politicians are “parading around, feeding their own self interests, and lying - blatantly - and they get away with it.”

Lessons for the Election 

Far from Westminster, regardless of the words of the one-time would-be Prime Minister Andrea Leadsom, the cost-of-living crisis has gone nowhere. Two years after prices first began to soar and inflation reached highs unseen in a generation, the effects continue to be felt. Prices are still rising. Wages are still failing to catch up. 

The story is written across the country, in the lives of those who are struggling to get by. They are forced to make impossible choices - between heating their homes or feeding their kids. They are sacrificing the smallest of luxuries, forced to “scrimp and save” for the barest of necessities. They feel like they have lost their future, and that Britain itself has collapsed back into the “middle ages”. They look at their local community - shuttered doors, vape shops, bin bags lining the street - and they see “ghost towns”. 

The experience feels profoundly unfair. Unfair, both because no one in a country as wealthy as Britain should have to live like this. And also because they feel like they deserved more: they worked hard, they played by the rules, and this is all they have received by way of reward. The result is a sense of sadness, sometimes anger, and often hopelessness and fear. 

Britain’s economic story is a cost-of-living story. The upcoming election, expected as the cold weather begins to bite once again in Autumn 2024, will be a cost-of-living election. Both parties must ask themselves: what will they do to address the greatest economic hardship that Britons have faced in a generation and more? 

Beneath the abstract ways in which we all tend to talk about politics - the millions and billions, the fractions and percentages, economic jargon like GDP and productivity - there are real people, living real lives, with real prices soaring and real wages flat. 

One of the most famous campaign slogans of recent political history was a mantra repeated on the trail during Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign: “it’s the economy, stupid.” In 2024, the story will be similar, but more specific: it’s the cost-of-living, stupid. 

Since 2022, the cost-of-living has never surrendered its position as the top issue facing the country, in the eyes of British voters. It would be a foolish politician who thinks, as some apparently do, that the crisis is over. 

Its electoral consequences, at the very least, have yet to be felt.