‘Some people must be earning millions’: inequality in the UK’s highest-earning constituency

theguardian.com:

“You have got to be kidding me,” says Louis Margeite. “If that’s the average salary, some people must be earning millions, because no one we know earns anything remotely close to that.”

The 52-year-old postal worker has just learned he lives in the parliamentary seat with the highest average salary: the Cities of London and Westminster, where the mean average for full-time workers is almost £80,000, according to HMRC statistics, and rising fast.

Margeite has lived in the constituency all his life. Not in the white stucco mansions of Belgravia and Mayfair, but in Churchill Gardens, one of the country’s largest council estates. “Everyone assumes people who live in Westminster are fantastically wealthy, and don’t get me wrong, a lot of them are,” he says. “But there are a lot of us who are struggling – even those of us who are in what would have been considered good jobs.”

Such inequality is symptomatic of a national trend. The pay of the top 1% of earners across the UK – those already on more than £170,000 a year – is rising at an average annualised rate of 9.1%, according to an analysis of Office for National Statistics data.

At the same time, those in the lowest 10% – those earning below £8,000 a year – have seen their pay rise by just 1.3%. That’s far below the rate of inflation, currently at a 40-year high of 9.4% and forecast by the Bank of England to hit 13% in the coming months. The latest tranche of pay data from the ONS, due to be released on Tuesday, is expected to show even greater increases at the top and anaemic growth at the bottom.

HMRC payslip data shows the mean average salary in the Cities of London and Westminster is £79,693. Elsewhere in London, it is more than £75,000 in Poplar and Limehouse, and £55,500 in