Key Facts
1. Low growth: real wages grew by 33 per cent a decade from 1970 to 2007 on average, but this fell to below zero in the 2010s.
2. High inequality: income inequality in the UK was higher than any other large European country in 2018.
3. The toxic combination: low- income households in the UK
are 22 per cent poorer than their counterparts in France, and typical household incomes are 9 per cent lower.
4. Stalled progress: 8 million young workers have never worked in an economy with sustained average wage rises, and those born in the early 1980s were almost half as likely to own a home as those born in the early 1950s at age 30.
5. Levelling up: income per person
in the richest local authority – Kensington and Chelsea (£52,500) – was over 4 times that of the poorest – Nottingham (£11,700) – in 2019.
6. Brexit Britain: fishing output could shrink by 30 per cent by 2030 as
a result of Brexit, but food and beverages manufacturing output could increase by more than 5 per cent.
7. The nature of our economy: Britain is the second largest exporter of services in the world, behind only the US.
8. Good work: half of shift workers in Britain receive less than a week’s notice of their working hours or schedules.
9. Staying put: young people from the most-deprived areas are two- and-a-half times less likely to leave their home area upon reaching adulthood than their peers in the least-deprived places.xxxxxxxxxx
10. Burden sharing: wealth has risen from three to almost eight times national income since the 1980s, but wealth taxes have flatlined as a share of GDP.
• The UK economy has huge strengths, from high employment to world class universities.
• But, having grown more quickly than most advanced economies from the 1990s to the mid-2000s, the UK has been in relative decline ever since: the average productivity gap with France, Germany and the US nearly doubled, to 16 per cent, between 2008 and 2019.
• Slow growth is the cause of Britain’s flatlining wages: real wages grew
by an average of 33 per cent a decade from 1970 to 2007, but this fell to below zero in the 2010s. By 2018 typical household incomes were 16 per cent lower in the UK than in Germany and 9 per cent lower than in France, having been higher in 2007.
• Having surged during the 1980s, and remained consistently high ever since, income inequality in the UK was higher than any other large European country in 2018. Inequality between places is high and persistent too.
• This is stagnation: the toxic combination of low growth and high inequality. It is ruinous for low-to-middle income Britons. Low-income households
in the UK are 22 per cent poorer than their counterparts in France, meaning their living standards are £3,800 a year lower than their French equivalents’.
• The young have also lost out: 8 million younger workers have never worked in an economy with sustained average wage rises, and those born in the early 1980s were almost half as likely to own a home as those born in the early 1950s at age 30.
• Stagnation leaves public services struggling, even as the tax burden rises: taxes are on course to reach their highest share of GDP since the 1940s.
Related
Comments