Unsung Britain· Living standards· Demographics Unsung Britain The changing economic circumstances of the poorer half of Britain 13 November 2024 Mike Brewer Molly Broome Nye Cominetti Adam Corlett Charlie McCurdy Louise Murphy Cara Pacitti Hannah Slaughter James Smith Lalitha Try This report marks the launch of Unsung Britain, a one-year research programme designed to understand the economic circumstances of today’s low-to-middle income families and how these have changed in recent decades, with support from JPMorganChase. The launch paper finds that Britain’s 13 million low-to-middle income families are older and more likely to suffer from poor health or a disability than three decades ago. This means more lower-income families are caring for adults, with 1-in-8 people in this group caring for an ill, disabled or elderly adult. People in low-to-middle income families are now over three times more likely to be economically inactive due to ill-health than because they are looking after children, a significant change from 1994-95, when the rates were the same. Despite all this, lower-income families are far more likely to be in work today than they were in the mid-1990s. Meanwhile, there has been a fall in homeownership among low-to-middle income families – declining from a peak of 40 per cent in 2000-01 to around 30 per cent in 2022-23. This, coupled with a lack of social housing, has pushed a record share of poorer families into the high-cost private-rented sector. These high housing costs, coupled with a slowdown in wage growth, have contributed to a worrying long-term living-standards stagnation across the poorer half of Britain.
