Recent findings appear to highlight the possibility of a return to near Victorian levels of inequality in the UK. It seems that however much we like to imagine that the wealth divide is a diminishing issue in British society the growth of the housing market, amongst other factors, is actually causing an increasingly pronounced gap to appear between the haves and the have-nots.

This divide also seems to be measurable in starkly geographic terms; unsurprisingly it’s the southern half of the country that has become increasingly prosperous whilst the north fares rather less well. Despite only accounting for 39% of households those living south of Watford own a disproportionate 51% of the nation’s assets. This shift is partly attributable to a massive increase in the proportion of the country’s wealth held in housing to 42% –nearly double what it was 30 years ago – and means that a housing divide between the wealthy areas that have seen the most pronounced growth and poorer areas where growth has been relatively tiny has become more significant than ever.

These regional wealth divisions are also evident in recent savings statistics taken from a survey conducted for Alliance & Leicester Savings – even amongst the poorest Londoners (the poorest half of the local population) savings average £1,015, a figure that dwarfs the £186 average for poorer people in the West Midlands. For an even more dramatic disparity compare this figure with the average savings of the richer half of London’s population, a figure which currently stands at £93,963.

The governments preferred measure of economic prosperity GVA (Gross Value Added) which measures the contribution to the economy of each individual producer, industry or sector only serves to reinforce the impression of a growing divide; where London has seen an increase between 1997 and 2005 from 129 to 136 the West Midlands for instance has witnessed a decline from 93 to 89.

Findings like these have recently prompted a left of center think tank – Institute of Public Policy Research North (IPPRN) to claim that the government is ‘in denial’ about the divide and have called for Gordon Brown to set tougher targets to tackle the growth of this perceived inequality.

Savings statistics sourced from the Bank of England, the DCLG, the CML and Alliance & Leicester survey data for an Alliance & Leicester Savings survey.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 at 8:57 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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