Ipsos end of year research 2011
Only 23% of Britons say that their children will have a higher quality of life than they have, while 35% think it will be lower, says new research we have carried out ahead of our 2011 End of Year event.
Ahead of Ipsos’s End of Year Review 2011, newly released research highlights the scale of the challenges facing the country.
As the Office for Budget Responsibility revises down its growth forecasts, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies says that real median household income will be no higher in 2015-16 than in 2002-3, our research suggests that these are not just challenges for the coming year, but for generations to come. Only 23% of Britons say that their children will have a higher quality of life than they have, while 35% think it will be lower. This is a striking turnaround from eight years ago, when the optimists outweighed the pessimists by 43% to 12%.
More generally, only a third (32%) think it likely that today’s youth will have a better life than their parents, while twice as many say it is unlikely. This is worse than when the same question was asked in the United States in April this year. Gallup found that 44% of Americans thought it was likely today’s youth would have a better life than their parents, and 55% thought it was unlikely (and this was the first time that pessimists have outweighed optimists since the question has been asked since 1983).
This pessimism has fed through to views about Britain as a whole. Three in five (61%), now say that Britain is getting worse as a place to live, up from 49% in June 2010, while only 6% say it is getting better. This is still, though, not quite as bad as in 2008 when 71% said it was getting worse, at a time of much discussion about “Broken Britain”.
Opinion is divided on whether there is a real need to cut spending on public services, in order to pay off the very high national debt we now have: 44% agree, 43% disagree. This is back to the situation in late 2009/early 2010; after the 2010 election, public opinion swung into believing that on balance there was a real need to cut spending on public services.
Having said all that, the majority are still satisfied with their living standards at the moment (70%), and say they feel happy with their life (76%), although this are not uncommon findings. Even so, there has been a rise in unhappiness and dissatisfaction with living standards since earlier this century.
