Unsung Britain - The Changing Economic Circumstances Of The Poorer Half Of Britain

14th November 2024

This report marks the launch of Unsung Britain, a one-year research programme designed to understand the economic circumstances of today's low-to-middle income families and how these have changed in recent decades, with support from JPMorganChase.

The launch paper finds that Britain's 13 million low-to-middle income families are older and more likely to suffer from poor health or a disability than three decades ago.

This means more lower-income families are caring for adults, with 1-in-8 people in this group caring for an ill, disabled or elderly adult. People in low-to-middle income families are now over three times more likely to be economically inactive due to ill-health than because they are looking after children, a significant change from 1994-95, when the rates were the same.

Despite all this, lower-income families are far more likely to be in work today than they were in the mid-1990s. Meanwhile, there has been a fall in homeownership among low-to-middle income families - declining from a peak of 40 per cent in 2000-01 to around 30 per cent in 2022-23.

This, coupled with a lack of social housing, has pushed a record share of poorer families into the high-cost private-rented sector. These high housing costs, coupled with a slowdown in wage growth, have contributed to a worrying long-term living-standards stagnation across the poorer half of Britain.

Lower-income families are now almost as likely to be in their 50s as in their 20s (20 and 21 per cent respectively) - a big shift from the mid-1990s, when people in this group were around 60 per cent more likely to be in their 20s.

3-in-10 working-age adults in low-to-middle income families said they had a disability in 2022-23, up from less than two-in-ten (19 per cent) in the mid-1990s.

One-in-eight people in a low-to-middle income family care for an ill, disabled or elderly adult. Lower-income families are significantly more likely to have adult caring responsibilities than higher-income families (12 per cent vs 8 per cent).

But while lower-income Britain has got older and sicker, overall levels of worklessness has fallen over the past 30 years. The share of low-to-middle income households that are workless has almost halved since the mid-1990s (from 24 per cent in 1996-97 to 13 per cent in 2022-23).

This fall in worklessness has been driven by rising employment, particularly among women. Employment rates among mothers in low-to-middle income families have increased the most sharply - from 46 per cent in 1996-97 to 58 per cent by 2022-23.

Between 1994-95 and 2004-05, the typical non-pensioner low-to-middle income real household disposable income grew by almost 50 per cent. But in the two decades since the mid-2000s, growth has tailed off - incomes have grown by just 10 per cent for the typical low-to-middle income family, and by just 7 per cent for the tenth percentile of the income distribution.

Red the full report HERE
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