Three very helpful reports on living standards in the United Kingdom:
James Plunkett, Growth without gain? The faltering living standards of people on low-to-middle incomes
Matthew Whittaker and Lee Savage, Missing out: why ordinary workers are experiencing growth without gain
Wenchao Jin, Robert Joyce, David Phillips, and Luke Sibieta, Poverty and inequality in the UK: 2011
To keep up with U.K. developments, I typically look to:
Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion
Centre for Economic Performance
Lane Kenworthy 
Thanks for sharing!
How much?
How much would you pay to go back to 1970s or whatever you define as the good old days and be better off?
A way to grasp the conceptual difficulties of measuring changes in living standards and life expectancies across the decades is to step into Brad De Long’s time machine.
In this thought experiment, DeLong asks how much you would want in additional income to agree to go back in time to a specific year.
DeLong was an economic historian examining the differences in American living standards between 1990 and 1890.
DeLong would have refused to go at all unless he could at least have taken mid-20th century modern medicine with him. Otherwise it would have meant dying from a childhood phenomena.
Reality television programmes are common-place today using the large differences in even 20th century living standards as their themes.
The latest cable TV niche targeting younger audiences is programmes about the technological backwardness of the 1970s and even the 1980s.
I do not long for the 70s.