Workers in Britain are £11,000 worse off a year due to 15 years of ‘wage stagnation’, damning report finds
- Calculations based on if wages had continued to grow at pace seen before 2008
- Average worker would have made £11k more per year, considering rising prices
- *BBC Panorama: Surviving the Pay Squeeze airs on BBC One at 8pm tonight*
Britain’s workers are £11,000 worse off per year due to 15 years of wage stagnation, a think-tank has concluded in a damning report.
The Resolution Foundation made the calculations based on whether wages had continued to grow at the pace seen before the 2008 financial crash.
The think-tank said if this had happened, the average worker would have made £11,000 more per year than they do now, taking rising prices into account.
It also found that average UK household incomes have dropped behind those in Germany – with the gap now at £4,000 a year, having been over £500 in 2008.
In new figures shared with BBC Panorama, which airs on BBC One tonight at 8pm, the think-tank studied how ‘real wages’ have not had sustained growth for 15 years.
Torsten Bell, chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, told MailOnline: ‘The wage stagnation of the past decade and a half is almost completely unprecedented.
‘Nobody who’s alive and working in the British economy today has ever seen anything like this, and the toxic combination of low growth and high inequality has left poorer households particularly exposed.
‘This is definitely not what normal looks like. This is what failure looks like, and we urgently need an economic strategy to turn this state of affairs around.’
A Treasury spokesman told the broadcaster the Government was increasing incentives for investment and signalled low unemployment – as well as its plan to increase growth – as signs the country was on the right track.
The data follows a major Resolution Foundation report in July 2022 about wage stagnation, which found that real wages grew by 33 per cent a decade from 1970 to 2007 on average, but this dropped to below zero in the 2010s.
That study also found that income inequality in the UK was higher than in any other large European country in 2018.
Workers are £11,000 worse off per year due to 15 years of wage stagnation, according to the Resolution Foundation. Pictured: Nurses on a picket line outside a hospital in Bath last month
Meanwhile, unions are accusing the Conservatives of presiding over the worst period for living standards in modern history.
An analysis by the TUC released today suggested that by the end of this Parliament, household disposable incomes will have fallen for nearly half of the time the Conservatives have been in office.
By the date of the next general election, household disposable income will have fallen for six of the 14 years the Conservatives have been in power, the union predicts.
The TUC said the current squeeze on family budgets is the longest and deepest since records began in the 1950s.
BBC Panorama: Surviving the Pay Squeeze airs on BBC One at 8pm tonight
