The hollowing out of London: how poverty patterns are changing

The hollowing out of London: how poverty patterns are changing

The largest falls in the proportions of households that are neither wealthy or poor has been in outer boroughs of London.

Today in England over a quarter (27 per cent) of households are poor, meaning that they are unable to take part in the norms of society, they are unable to purchase items which the majority of the population consider to be necessities and, very often, their children are unable to take part in relatively cheap school trips or have a birthday party because of lack of money. In recent years that proportion has been rising. These rises that have been documented in great detail by the UK government funded Economic and Social Research Council’s Poverty and Social Exclusion team.

Just under a quarter (24 per cent) of all households in England are rich, meaning that if all their members were to die today their estate would probably be subject to inheritance tax. That proportion of people does not actually pay inheritance tax on death because they tend not to die young and they spend or transfer most of their wealth in old age; but at any one time roughly a quarter of the population is wealthy. That proportion has been rising slowly in recent years, primarily because of rises in property prices in the South East of England.

These changes mean that nationally, for the first time ever, a minority of households in England (48 per cent) are neither rich nor poor according to these definitions of poverty and wealth. In the early Eighties some two thirds (66 per cent) of households were in the middle, were neither rich nor poor in England.

The economic polarisation that has resulted in such great divisions has been most pronounced in London where the proportion of households who are neither rich nor poor has fallen to 37 per cent most recently and is almost certainly continuing to fall. Some 36 per cent of London’s households are now poor and just 27 per cent are wealthy. The proportion that is wealthy within London is this low because relatively few householders in London own their home outright or have paid off a substantial proportion of their mortgage.

Read more from this research by Benjamin Hennig and Danny in the New Statesman or in Danny’s web archive. Further material from the research funded by the Trust for London can be found on the Londonmapper project website which features the full report and interactive map visualisations.