Wealth distribution in the UK is very unequal.
If we compare the average (median household) wealth of the top 1% in the UK to the bottom 10%, the top 1% are more than 500 times wealthier....
I got to wondering what the redistributive effects might be of taking just 50% of this wealth from the top 1% and just giving it to the bottom 10-30% of households might be....
NB the median household worth of the bottom 10% is just £8K.
50% would still leave the top 1% with £2M of household wealth, richer than the average 10% still.
The calculations are based on there being 23 Million households in the UK, so the top 1% = around 230 000 households, the bottom 10% would be 2.3M and the bottom 30% 6.9M.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation calculates that around 20% of households in the UK are in poverty, increasing the wealth of bottom 10% would tackle the worst of this. (I just looked at the bottom 10% to 30% for fun!)
The (quite profound) results...
Obvs I did a spreadsheet...
So £4M * 50% / 230K (HH) and then that / 23M (HH) would give each of the HH in the bottom 10% £22K each....
And if we did a 20/30/50 split for the bottom 3rd/2nd/ 1st decile respectively they'd each get an extra £11K, £6.5K and £4.5K respectively.
Now I'm not advocating for this but £22K on average per household - that's insulation, damp-proofing (a lot of these HH would be in poor condition), maybe debt-relief, maybe paying for an L4 course for one of the members...
There's a whole lot of social good that could be done with that money, rather than it sitting in wealth funds and being skimmed by the very rich and then passed down to their undeserving kids!
Really this was just a numbers exercise not a political statement!