The gradual shift in responsibility for welfare provision, from the government to individuals, is making household saving and wealth holding a key policy concern. Yet remarkably little is known about how much households save or the forms in which they save.Unlike income or expenditure, there is...

This report looks at the level of wealth and the rate of saving of households in the UK on the eve of the global economic crisis. Our approach is to use microdata sources to look at the extent to which wealth holdings and saving rates vary across individuals. We use the British Household Panel...

This report sets out what has happened to income and expenditure inequality in the 1990s and early 2000s, comparing the changes to previous decades. Although income is very often used for assessing living standards in this country, spending is often more informative, because many people can...

Government wants both to reduce carbon emissions and to reduce 'fuel poverty'. Energy prices have risen in part because of a multitude of policies aimed at reducing emissions. There are also multiple policies aimed at ameliorating these effects. Altogether, this leads to a complex policy...

How have household incomes evolved since the onset of the financial crisis? How has the gap between rich and poor changed? How have living standards changed over time for different parts of the population? How many people are in poverty and which groups are most likely to face poverty? Each...

Most analysis of the impact of taxes and benefits on households is cross-sectional, with individuals classified as rich or poor, and gains and losses calculated, using a single snapshot of data. In this report, we argue the case for taking a longer-run perspective. In particular, we show that...

Official data on the distribution of household incomes in the UK are available only with a significant lag: the latest statistics are for 2013-14. In this report, we use modelling techniques to provide a more up-to-date picture and to assess how things are likely to evolve in the coming years....

The focus of this report is the distribution of household income in the UK. We assess the changes to average incomes, income inequality and poverty that occurred in the latest year of data (2014-15), and put these in historical context using comparable data spanning the last 50 years. The...

How have household incomes evolved since the onset of the financial crisis? How has the gap between rich and poor changed? How have living standards changed over time for different parts of the population? How many people are in poverty and which groups are most likely to face poverty? Each...

This report examines how household incomes were changing in the UK up to the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic, and how other measures of household living standards have changed over the course of the pandemic. In particular, we use the latest official data covering years up to 2019-20 to provide a...