Three facts reveal starkly to me that we don’t yet live in a ‘liberal Britain.’ First, overall income inequality hasn’t fallen since the early 1990s, but share of income held by the top 1% has soared. Shockingly, the richest 1% of UK households have more wealth than the bottom half of the population put together. Second, at the top end, the majority of the Cabinet, senior doctors, judges and journalists still come from independent schools. And at the bottom end, 17% of Britons lived in absolute low income households in 2014 ( 23% after housing costs), while 19% of children still live in absolute low income households. Finally, new figures show that the zero hours workers now approaches one million.

My contention is that in a Liberal Britain we’d revolutionise policy by refocusing our party on equality and social justice and use the concept of individual wellbeing as a way to find new solutions to longstanding social problems. The preamble to our constitution sums up our fundamental and enduring values of liberty, equality and community.  My key message is that we mustn’t forget equality – and tackling inequalities – and need to talk more about it.

Being liberal means we have an ambitious idea of what freedom entails, the sort outlined by liberal thinkers such as Thomas Green and Leonard Hobhouse, which sees real liberty as a positive freedom—being empowered to make meaningful choices about the sort of life you want to live as well as contributing to the common good. It also means showing real compassion for the worst off. High levels of inequality in housing, education, employment and a sense of financial security are at odds with a society in which everyone is free and are bad for our health and well-being too As Wilkinson and Pickett demonstrated so powerfully in The Spirit Level, societies with the largest inequality between the rich and the poor tend to have higher levels of crime and less trust and social cohesion. In short, inequality damages our whole social fabric and sense of belonging.

For me, Liberal Britain is a country where we improve people’s lives by tackling the growing inequalities in our society. We should look at the detrimental effects of inequality on individual well-being, and come forward with policy responses such as:

• Helping young people to get their first foot on the jobs ladder and access to decent and affordable housing so that younger generations aren’t worse off than their parents and feel they have reasonable prospects for the future;
• Requiring large firms to publish information about the ratio between their highest and lowest paid, and taking action on the gender pay gap;
• Tackle zero-hours contracts and low-pay for the most disadvantaged. A good way to start would be to increase the threshold for paying National Insurance – a more targeted and effective response for the low paid than simply raising the personal tax allowance;
• Righting some of the obvious wrongs in recent welfare reform like the bedroom tax, or reducing benefits for disabled people and focus instead on designing effective work programmes which actually help people to find suitable, stable employment;
• Properly funding good quality mental health care and ensuring it is accessible to everyone who needs it in a timely fashion;
• Proper funding for social care as well as supporting families and friends acting as carers for loved ones – a role that 60% of us will play at some point in our lives.

Not only is this the right thing to do but polls and surveys increasingly tell us that the majority of British people support these type of goals. Indeed quite a few people support an increase in government funding for programmes that help the young, the poor and the unemployed, even if this might raise their taxes. Now there’s something to think about!

* Claire Tyler, Baroness Tyler of Enfield, has been in the House of Lords since 2011, taking an active role in the areas of health and social care, welfare reform, social mobility, well-being, children and family policy, machinery of government and the voluntary sector. She is the Liberal Democrat member of the Lords Select Committee on Social Mobility, and co-chair of the APPG on Social Mobility