Living standards, poverty and inequality in the UK: 2020
Back to Topic
Click to Print
Useful Websites
Glossary Term Selection
This article is 4 years old.
Click here to view the latest articles for this topic.
Report by Pascale Bourquin, Robert Joyce and Agnes Norris Keiller
This report examines how living standards – most commonly measured by households’ incomes – were changing in the UK up to approximately the eve of the current COVID-19 crisis, using the latest official household income data covering years up to 2018–19. We particularly focus on how this differed for different groups, and what this meant for poverty and inequality. It gives us a comprehensive account of where we stood before the current crisis, including for groups who we now know have subsequently had their economic lives turned upside down.
Key findings:
- The COVID-19 crisis hit at a time when income growth had already been extremely disappointing for some years. Median (middle) household income was essentially the same in 2018−19 (the latest data) as in 2015−16. This stalling itself came after only a short-lived recovery from the Great Recession. The combined effect had been a decade of unprecedented poor improvemen...
Want to see the rest of this article?
Would you like to see the rest of this article and all the other benefits that Issues Online can provide with?
- Useful related articles
- Video and multimedia references
- Statistical information and reference material
- Glossary of terms
- Key Facts and figures
- Related assignments
- Resource material and websites
