No two words better sum up the temper of our times than “money worries”. A middle-class friend recently told me how, when the gas bill arrives, he’s taken to playing with it, even hiding it, deferring the moment of ripping it open. Last Thursday, butterflies flew round the stomachs of the whole home-buying class, as it waited in dread to find out just how far the Bank of England would jack up the cost of mortgage repayments in the coming years.
All, or nearly all, of us are suddenly feeling something of the wave of worry that has been crashing over the more exposed communities for some years. Analyses of GP records reveal that “codings” for symptoms or diagnoses of anxiety disorders are up by half across the whole population since 2010, while tripling amongst the youngest adults.
Already by 2017-18, 7.3m adults in England—that is 17 per cent of the total—had received antidepressants at some point. The number of prescriptions, which is highest in northern economic blackspots such as Blackpool and Barnsley, continues to rise—up by a third over the last six years. This outpaces any global trend towards for doctors answering misery with medication: the latest cross-country OECD data records British dosages per capita rising 64 per cent in recent years, against 29 per cent for Germany and 12 per cent for Italy, and an outright decline in Denmark.
All this has occurred in parallel with huge shifts that have left ever more of our population financially exposed. After the long 20th-century tide of rising home ownership swung into reverse, the 21st has so far witnessed a 10 percentage point “swing” of the working-age population out of homebuying and into the wild west of the UK’s private rental market. As for ready rainy-day funds, Whitehall’s Family Resources Survey records the proportion of families with “no savings” swelling from 28 to 36 per cent over the decade after the financial crisis.
Putting the two halves of this together—the psychological and the financial—it’s easy to imagine a dark spiral of insecurity. A dark loop in which money worries impede confidence and darken moods, retarding progression at work and straining relationships, outcomes which themselves further heighten economic exposure, giving the vortex another twist. My new report with Andrew Wenham steps inside this putative spiral, by comparing how the same individual people are faring on both the material security and the mental health fronts.
We first divide the population into secure and insecure groups—homeowners versus renters, those with meaningful savings versus those without, those in steady jobs versus those on insecure contracts, and so on. Next, we look at how each group fares on 12 anxiety markers, which range from sleepless nights to impeded social lives, recorded in the vast Understanding Society survey. We don’t employ especially sophisticated statistical techniques, but we don’t need to: in every case and on virtually every anxiety marker, the insecure group scores higher, usually dramatically so.
Renters, for example, were fully three times more likely than homeowners to be losing sleep or taking less care at work. Those with minimal savings were three times as likely to feel worthless and more than twice as likely to feel depressed as those with £5,000 plus.
Interestingly, this really does appear to be a story of insecurity, rather than simple insufficiency. Just as you would expect, the distress markers do flash more often in the lower parts of the income distribution: life is less stressful when you have more coming in. But the difference in the incidence of the mental problems between the bottom- and middle-income bracket are only of the order of a half, as compared to the doubling or tripling of rates associated with lacking a modest savings buffer.
One implication for public policy is that if—a big if admittedly—we could somehow directly redistribute “security”, this could work wonders for mental health. Aims should include reversing the drift towards private rentals, or at the very least making renting less anxiety-inducing, toughening up protections regarding stable working hours and earnings, and possibly even directly distributing some assets.
As ever, hard-bitten politicians and officials will ask whether we can afford any of this. But with mental ill-health costing the NHS £15bn annually and the wider economy an estimated £100bn plus, we would do well to flip the question—and ask whether our anxiety nation can afford not to fix its insecurity problem.
