Today we publish Riders on the Storm our new report on middle income households. But you know their story, right? The operative verb is to squeeze, or to be squeezed. Yet the data we’ve used – a panel survey conducted by researchers from the University of Essex for the past 20 years – shows something different.
The middle 20 per cent of working age households in 2011-12 (the latest survey data available) had on average the same income in real terms as four years ago. In other words, even in the teeth of the greatest recession in a century, their income wasn’t squeezed, though it did stop increasing. It gets better, literally. Start at the other end in 2007-08 and two fifths of the middle income households moved up into the 40 per cent of the distribution that was above them. Around the same number stayed where they were in the middle 20 per cent. The rest moved down.
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