Britain’s wealth gap is growing and it’s now practically impossible for a typical worker to save enough to become rich, according to a report.<\/p>\n
Analysis by The Resolution Foundation, a left-leaning thinktank, found it would take average earners 52 years to accrue savings that would take them from the middle to the top of wealth distribution.<\/p>\n
The total needed would be about \u00a31.3m, and assumes they save almost all of their income.<\/p>\n
Wealth gaps are “entrenched”, it said, meaning that who your parents are – and what assets they may have – is becoming more important to your living standards than how hard you work.<\/p>\n
While the UK’s wealth has “expanded dramatically over recent decades”, it’s been mainly fuelled by periods of low interest rates and increases in asset worth – not wage growth or buying new property.<\/p>\n
Citing figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Wealth And Assets Survey, the thinktank found household wealth reached \u00a317trn in 2020-22, with \u00a35.5trn (32%) held in property and \u00a38.2trn (48%) in pensions.<\/p>\n
The report said: “As a result, Britain’s wealth reached a new peak of nearly 7.5 times GDP by 2020-22, up from around three times GDP in the mid-1980s.<\/p>\n
“Yet, despite this remarkable increase in the overall stock of wealth, relative wealth inequality – measured by the share of wealth held by the richest households – has remained broadly stable since the 1980s, with the richest tenth of households consistently owning around half of all wealth.”<\/p>\n
According to the thinktank, this trend has worsened intergenerational inequality.<\/p>\n
It said the wealth gap between people in their early 30s and people in their early 60s has more than doubled between 2006-08 and 2020-22 – from \u00a3135,000 to \u00a3310,000, in real cash terms.<\/p>\n
Regional inequality remains an issue, with median average wealth per adult higher in London and the South East.<\/p>\n
Could wealth tax be the answer?<\/p>\n
The report comes seven weeks before Rachel Reeves<\/a> delivers her budget on 26 November, having batted away calls earlier this year for a wealth tax.<\/p>\n Former Labour leader Lord Kinnock is among those to have called for one, in an interview with Sky News<\/a>.<\/p>\n Read more from Sky News: But speaking to Bloomberg last month, Ms Reeves said: “We already have taxes on wealthy people – I don’t think we need a standalone wealth tax.”<\/p>\n Previous government policies targeting Britain’s richest, notably a move to grab billions from non-doms, has led to concerns about an exodus of wealth<\/a>. The prime minister has denied that too many are leaving the capital<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Britain’s wealth gap is growing and it’s now practically impossible for a typical worker to save enough to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":200214,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[64,63,13044,99,186,77039,184,185,125191,19032,125192],"class_list":{"0":"post-200213","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-personal-finance","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-britain","11":"tag-business","12":"tag-finance","13":"tag-household-wealth","14":"tag-personal-finance","15":"tag-personalfinance","16":"tag-resolution-foundation","17":"tag-wealth-gap","18":"tag-wealth-tax"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200213"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200213\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/200214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
What is a wealth tax?<\/a>
What wealth tax options could Britain have?<\/a><\/p>\n