Poor pay growth and rising asset prices pose a real threat to social mobility

From a historical perspective, wealth inequality in the UK is not particularly high now.

- Ben Zaranko

Go back a century, and participants in the 1926 General Strike lived in a society where around 90% of all wealth was held by the richest 10%, and 60% of all wealth by the richest 1%. Today, a little less than 60% of wealth is held by the top 10%, and around 20% by the top 1%. Those numbers have barely budged since the mid-1980s.

Nor is UK wealth inequality particularly high by international standards: the top 1% share is lower here than in France, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Spain, Italy, Canada, Australia and the US, according to the World Inequality Database.

But to focus solely on the headline statistics is to miss the more complicated, and more concerning, changes underneath.

For starters, household wealth - the value of houses, pension pots, bank accounts, financial investments, and other assets - has soared in recent decades. It has consistently grown faster than the overall economy. In 1991, the wealth of all households in the UK amounted to about three-and-a-half times annual GDP; it is now more like seven times GDP.