Hi ,
We know that wealth in the UK is wildly unequal. It's also shockingly unequal no matter how you look at it: distribution, geography, ethnicity, gender, age, class and more. That matters as wealth becomes more and more important to the way our society runs.
According to the latest data from the Office of National Statistics, household wealth holdings vary enormously by ethnicity. The average household headed by a White British person holds £314,000 in wealth; the average Black African household just £34,000. There's a huge amount of variation depending on ethnic background; Pakistani households hold £224,000 while Black Caribbean ones hold just under £86,000 on average. There's also a lot of difference in inequality within ethnic groups, with Pakistani households much more equally distributed than White, Chinese, or Indian ones.
It's no surprise to anyone that Britain has an ethnic wealth gap, but the variety of gaps is much more difficult to explain. We know that the structural inequalities in education, healthcare, property, income, and even regional distribution play big roles, and there's a lot of evidence around those factors, but we often struggle to explain exactly how they work for different ethnic groups. A lot of studies make references to cultural background and attitudes to wealth, but those, too, are often very poorly understood.
For example, the one of the biggest contributions to wealth is whether you're able to own a home and benefit from the rise in house prices. Obviously, the easiest way to own a home now, decades into the the housing crisis, is to have bought it (or inherited it from someone who did) when housing was more affordable. Therefore, you'd want to look at when communities tended to migrate to the UK, with the arrivals in the 1950s and 60s more able to accrue wealth that way than groups who tended to arrive in the 90s and 2000s. But Black Caribbeans, who tended to arrive in the 1950s, have lower home ownership rates than Indians, who migrated in the 60s, and a much lower median household wealth. Clearly, the barriers to owning a home, and how much owning a home helps you build wealth, are experienced very differently by those groups.
And those barriers are very much still in existence today. For younger people especially, wealth gaps are rapidly widening. If we want to give people an equal stake in society, we urgently need to understand what the barriers are and how they're experienced.
That's why we're been working with the London School of Economics on a project aimed at understanding these gaps, how they're created, and how they're perceived. We trained Community Reporters across the UK to collect stories from people in their communities about what wealth means to them and the barriers they've experienced.
What these stories tell us is that the barriers to wealth are incredibly complex and interconnected. We found that structural inequalities were everywhere and very well understood, but also that individuals often blamed themselves for not overcoming them. We found that the crises we're in are being experienced very differently in different ethnic groups. And we found that people have very clear ideas of how they'd like society to work better, but struggle to get those in power to listen to them |
