The UN’s extreme poverty expert is embarking on a 12-day visit to Spain to see what the government of Europe’s fifth largest economy is doing to address inequality, unemployment and social exclusion.

Philip Alston, the special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, will begin his fact-finding mission in Madrid on Monday before travelling to Galicia, the Basque country, Extremadura, Andalucía and Catalonia.

Alston said he would be looking into how Spain’s social protection system works for those in poverty and examining areas such as housing, education and healthcare.

“I think there’s no shortage of statistical indicators to suggest that Spain has significant problems in terms of its less well-off population,” he said.

“Anyone who reads reports will know that there’s something of a housing crisis in Spain. I think there are pretty serious issues about the level of unemployment in general – but particularly for youth and also for women. I’ll certainly be dealing with groups like children, people with disabilities, migrants and others, but I don’t think it’ll be confined to those more specialised areas.”

According to figures from Spain’s National Statistics Institute, 26.1% of the population lives at risk of poverty or social exclusion – up from 24.7% in 2008 when the financial crisis hit the country – while its unemployment rate of 14.1% is more than double the EU average.

About half the population has some difficulty making ends meet, and poverty is persistently higher for children, migrants, and Roma populations.

The rapporteur’s visit comes less than a month after the Spanish Socialist Workers’ party and the far-left, anti-austerity Unidas Podemos alliance entered office as Spain’s first coalition government since the 1930s. The prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has pledged to bring about a transformation in equality and social justice.

“The timing, which is fortuitous in a sense, turns out to be very good with a newish government settling in and with a clear commitment to trying to improve things in these areas,” said Alston.

“I’m hoping that by drawing attention to the issue I will actually find a somewhat receptive audience.”

He said he would look at what successive Spanish governments had done to tackle poverty and inequality in the wake of the financial crisis.

“I think that most governments are focused primarily on trying to get the economy moving again after a shock such as the recession that hit Spain particularly badly,” he said.

“But it may well be that now is the time to pay a lot more attention to issues of distribution because while the overall economy is certainly doing well, it’s not so clear that those in the bottom 50% or lower have seen the real benefits of the economic recovery. I think it’s going to be important to look at more focused policies that can ensure that the good news is more widely shared.”

Alston’s visit to Spain will be his last as special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, a post he has held since June 2014.

The conclusions of the New York-based human rights lawyer have sometimes provoked angry responses.

After his visit to the UK in November 2018, he said government policies had led to the “systematic immiseration of a significant part of the British population”. When the government dismissed his findings as “barely believable”, he wondered whether its “total denial of a set of uncontested facts” was “actually a spoof”.

In June 2018, he accused the Trump administration of exacerbating levels of inequality in the US and noted that the benefits of economic growth were going “overwhelmingly to the wealthy”.

Nikki Haley, then the US ambassador to the UN, complained it was “patently ridiculous for the United Nations to examine poverty in America” and suggested Alston should have focused instead on countries such as Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.