Something you realise when you travel around the UK is that only a handful of areas actually have a productive economy. In many towns, you find that the only outside money coming is from the government, either in the form of government organisations based there (councils, NHS, etc.) or benefits. That money then swills around the town on services like MOTs and hairdressers and so on.
That means the few productive areas like London, Birmingham and Manchester and a few others have essentially all of their production taken by the government and reallocated to these areas of zero/negative productivity. This isn't a new thing either. The UK has been in a "productivity crisis" since at least the late 2000s.
My family come from one of these productivity holes, and they are all on the take. Everyone's scamming the benefits system and any work they do is under the table.
Really I believe as a country, we need to face reality at some point. We have to turn off the tap that people have become dependent on and require that people figure out how to survive without it.
1. You cannot subsidise unproductive economies indefinitely. If there's no work in your local town, go somewhere else. It's a small country and somehow people from Eastern Europe manage to come here for work, so someone from Merthyr Tydfil can probably figure out how to get to Cardiff. Government spending should be on infrastructure to facilitate productivity.
2. The elderly are clogging up the system. Either we need to start cutting services to the old, such as reducing healthcare provision beyond a certain age, or we need to import massive amounts of productive labour from other countries to rebalance things, and build huge amounts of housing, hospitals, schools to support it.
3. We need to rebuild as a country of innovators. This means making the burden of regulations proportional to the size of your enterprise. But we also need a cultural shift here too. If you have an idea here, everyone will quickly tell you why it won't work and you shouldn't try. If you do it anyway and are successful, you become loathed. Tall poppy syndrome etc.
Everyone is blaming Brexit and sure, Brexit didn't help matters, especially over the last few years. But there are lots of countries doing fine outside the EU, and these problems started well before Brexit. Our problems are deeper rooted and, perhaps, in many ways EU membership was hiding them.