The public cares more about day-to-day survival than Brexit – it’s time we all took notice

If we want more people to enjoy the benefits of living in the fifth-largest economy in the world, we actually have to pay attention to what they really need

The cornerstone of government policy, we are told, is “levelling up”. Its purpose? To tackle regional inequalities in Britain. With this in mind, HS2 will reportedly receive the go-ahead on Tuesday alongside a number of other infrastructure projects targeted at the northern regions of the country.

As Andrew Woodcock, The Independent’s political editor reported on Sunday, the prime minister is expected to give the go-ahead for the first stretch of the high-speed rail link from London to Birmingham, reserving judgement on the second phase of the project – the extension to Leeds and Manchester. It makes sense given the multiplier effect such public investment has on the economy in terms of employment, increased productivity and spending.

That said, the additional £20bn a year we are told Sajid Javid, the chancellor, envisages spending on “levelling up” is unlikely to be sufficient to do the job. According to the National Institute for Economic and Social Research, it’ll boost output by just 0.3-0.4 per cent in the short term. He will need to give it a lot more firepower than that and there is a row already under way on where he will get the extra revenue.

Few will object to regional inequalities being addressed but this should not obscure the fact that inequalities exist elsewhere too. There are obstacles holding people back everywhere, not only the northern parts of England. Levelling up, in this sense, must be a UK-wide goal. Javid will have the opportunity to address these cross-country problems on 11 March when the budget is revealed. So what should he be thinking about?

Engage Britain, a new non-partisan organisation, commissioned Ipsos MORI to explore the public’s understanding of the challenges facing us today. The recently published results found that although Brexit was still seen as the most important issue facing the UK, people preferred to talk about issues such as the challenges facing public services, regardless of which region they belonged to. Interestingly, in the remarkable unfolding Irish general election, voters there also did not want to talk about Brexit, with the most important issues being health, housing and strained public services.

Ipsos found that the future of the NHS and social care was spontaneously identified as a key issue facing all groups in Britain but there was less agreement on how it should be tackled. Most political parties agree that the NHS should remain a publicly funded service, free at the point of use and not based upon one’s ability to pay. But people are living longer, there is more – thanks to medical advances – we can do to treat people, and there are growing problems of obesity and poor air quality impacting on people’s health, putting a huge strain on public services that are already under pressure.

Better integration of physical, mental and social care is a must. Mental health should be placed on an equal footing to physical health care in policy terms. More use of new technologies and much more focus on prevention, ensuring people lead healthier lives, is also needed. And, yes, the NHS must be more efficient. However, you cannot escape the fact we need to put more money into the system. So Javid should be bold and consider introducing a specific, hypothecated NHS tax to pay for it. This is not without its challenges, especially seeing as the Treasury has been opposed to it in the past, but with Lord Nick MacPherson, a former Treasury permanent secretary, even making the case for it, there may well be hope.

Participants in the Ipsos workshops and discussion groups also identified the need to help poor and struggling families, with ridiculously high costs of housing highlighted as one of the main causes of poverty. This is not surprising – without a secure home to retreat to, to organise one’s life, to bring up children, it is hard to lead a good life.

Nationally, there are more than 1 million on social housing waiting lists. Local authorities should be given more power, resources and revenue-capturing opportunities to build more council homes to accommodate these people.

And it is not just an issue of building more affordable homes, but improving the quality of the existing housing stock, too. In the private rented sector, we must improve conditions, put in place better consumer protection, give renters a genuine right to stay and stop landlords discriminating against those on benefits. These are just some of the problems Javid could address in our dysfunctional housing market.

People also identified the struggle of finding childcare while working as a problem that needs to be gripped and resolved by policy makers, according to Ipsos. The OECD has also found that the UK has the second most expensive childcare in the world – in London, it is the worst. The average price for 25 hours a week of nursery childcare for a child under two comes in at a whopping £6,600 a year (relative to a national median full-time salary of £30,000). The result is that with no government support between the end of parental leave and when your child reaches the age of three, too many new parents are forced to choose between caring for their child and their careers.

The government could solve this issue by radically increasing state-funded childcare, guaranteed parental leave (for both parents) and flexibility in work time. Yes, this costs money, but the 2019 Conservative manifesto was clear – they promised to take action “so that working parents do not have to choose between their careers and their children”. There will be no hiding place from this pledge when voters go to the polls again in 2024/25 – it is big and bold, and the first-time Tory voters along the so called “red wall” will expect it to be delivered.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of how we can “level up”. But if we want more people to enjoy the benefits of the fifth-largest economy in the world, any government that delivers in a tangible way in the three policy areas above will take some dislodging at the next election.

Chuka Umunna is a columnist for The Independent as well as a lawyer and a British politician