Last month I wrote about attitudes to inequality specifically why I think that recent headlines about Rampant Inequality are way off the mark. The belief that we live in an era of great inequality is so prevalent that a lot of people reacted with disbelief when I wrote that wealth inequality in the UK was at a historic low, despite recent small rises. For me it is poverty that matters more than inequality.
I wanted to balance that by writing about the changes in the way that the distribution of different forms of wealth accumulation – property and pensions – has changed over the last few decades.
Since the Credit Crunch there has been an accumulation of property wealth in fewer and fewer hands. In the immediate aftermath of the Crunch house prices fell sharply but the lack of liquidity in the financial system made it difficult for anyone without a big deposit to get a mortgage. First time buyers who would normally have benefited from cheaper prices were squeezed out, while people who could access lots of capital found it easy to amass big property portfolios. That’s why they call it capitalism.
I will admit that I was a beneficiary of this. I took a job in Leeds just after the Crunch and rather than sleep in hotels I bought a flat, whose value had fallen significantly, and which was conveniently situated near the bars on Call Lane. In the years up to the credit crunch large numbers of flats were built in and around Leeds City Centre, possibly as many as 20,000. By 2009 when I was shopping for a flat 10% of them were empty, many for over a year.
These flats saw very big falls in value, in developments like Aspect 24. As I travelled around the City viewing flats whose occupiers had bought them new and which had lost over 20% of their value, wiping out all of the cash buyers had put in. People like me who could access capital were able to buy choice properties cheaply, with mortgages at very low rates.
A recent speech by Andy Haldane from the Bank of England sets out the economics behind these experiences. Andy is my favourite Central Banker. I realise that having a fave Central Banker is an unusual thing, and marks me out as a bit of a policy nerd.
The Bank of England, like most Central Banks, reacted to the Credit Crunch with the most expansionary monetary policy in history. Interest rates were cut to their lowest ever levels, close to zero. Additional stimulus was provided through asset purchases – so-called Quantitative Easing or QE. These asset purchases by Central Banks are currently running at around a cumulative 15% of annual global GDP.
This pushed an awful lot of money through the Banking system and into the economy, to counteract the affects of the Credit Crunch. Bit by bit monetary policy changes helped to reflate the economy, and restart the housing market. By 2010 house prices were rising again, and continued to rise in areas like London all the way through to the Brexit vote. Those who had acquired additional properties during the Credit Crunch accumulated wealth as monetary policy pushed up prices.
It is a common assumption that the people who made money in the years following the credit crunch were the top 1% with gold hats, but a much broader group of people with plenty of capital, a property portfolio or stocks and shares benefitted too from expansionary monetary policy.
Despite this Andy Haldane argues that 10 years after the credit crunch Bank of England actions hadn’t made inequality worse – income distribution and the Gini coefficient today are the same as they were 10 years ago.
I am sceptical about some of the claims made about inequality but even I am baffled by Haldane’s views. He argues that the impacts on jobs and wages in lower incomes groups balances the increase in property wealth, and he has lots of graphs to prove it:
There are 8 pages of graphs to illustrate his point. I do like a good graph.
No matter how good the Bank of England’s graphs department are they can’t touch this graph from the Resolution Foundation, which is by far and away my favourite graph at the moment. Yes, I know that having a favourite graph is as odd as having a fave Central Banker.
You can find this graph and a great money other fine diagrams in this report:
http://www.resolutionfoundation.org/app/uploads/2018/03/Council-tax-IC.pdf
When Harold Wilson became Prime Minister total property wealth was worth 3 times annual GDP. Total wealth taxes brought into the Government a sum equivalent to just over 2% of GDP.
Today total property wealth is 7 times GDP, but the taxes on property still only bring in just over 2% of GDP for the Government.
Without being hyperbolic this has been the biggest stealth tax cut of all time. The tax cuts is partly caused by Governments fiddling with property taxes for political gain, but mostly due to the failure to reform or even rebase Council tax. This failure to update Council tax is a wholly regressive policy which gives an effective tax cut to those in the most expensive properties
If the Government take from property taxes had kept up with the increases in property wealth there would have been no need for the age of austerity.
I have long advocated using the accumulated property wealth of richer older cohorts to help fund the care costs of the baby boom generation. This is very unpopular, particularly where the care costs are as a result of an illness like Dementia. The Conservatives proposed some moderately progressive proposals to use property wealth to fund care at the last general election. Labour made hay opposing the “Dementia Tax” even though it put them in the position of defending inherited wealth.
Both parties in their own way are committed to defending inherited property wealth, largely because both main political parties are largely made up of people with property wealth. Looking at the graph above not only has the property market been a source of widening inequality since the Credit Crunch, but this as actually been going on for a very long time, Labour and Tory.
Even an inequality sceptic like me can see that housing and other assets like stocks and shares have become concentrated in fewer hands since the credit crunch. Rates of home ownership are back were they were before Margaret Thatcher started selling off Council Houses, and rates of share ownership are back where they were before the same Prime Minister sold off shares in public utilities. Stealth tax cuts just make this worse.
At this point I had convinced myself that there was something I was missing about the view of wealth and inequality. I am a big fan of Andy Haldane, but the size of wealth accumulation from property since the Credit Crunch, facilitated by BofE policy, must have increased inequality. I couldn’t see how he could be right.
I checked his findings against the latest data from the Office of National Statistics. This shows that even the recent rises in inequality has come to an end, and the current gap between rich and poor is static. The BofE were right:
What the ONS data sets shows is that the rise in wealth inequality due to property wealth is being offset by changes in pension wealth – over the last few years nearly £1tn has been added to the value of private pensions. Given that the total GDP of the UK is just under £2tn this is a huge amount.
For most people of my generation the most valuable things we own are our homes and our pensions, given that our collections of rare Morrissey solo records are plummeting in value. We tend to track the value of our houses much more carefully than the value of our pensions, despite the fact that as we get older some of us will have pension funds worth a lot more than our houses. Senior Doctors in NHS Super An can easily hit the £1m tax free limit.
Most people I know didn’t really notice the 2008 pensions act when it was passed, or when it was implemented a few years afterwards I certainly didn’t spot it, and I was working for a Quango sponsored by DWP. Frankly pensions are boring and complex, and even I struggle to keep track of it. For those who missed it the 2008 Act requires all employers to set up an occupational pension scheme, which employees are automatically enrolled in unless they opt out. The Act also established the National Employee Savings Trust, a public pension provider for those who do not have an occupational pensions, which functions as a low-fee pension scheme in competition with existing funds.
Part of the reason why the 2008 Act passed un-noticed is because most of the people who I know work in big companies or the public sector where access to good quality pensions is still widespread. We have grown used to reading pension horror stories, many of which are true, about the closure of final salary schemes . This has created the impression that whole pensions system is in crisis, but for most of my generation we are still in really good schemes. The people who are benefiting the most from the 2008 Act are low paid workers in the private sector, who for the first time are benefiting from the kind of occupational pensions that white collar public sector and private sector employees take for granted.
The impact of the increase in pension wealth for people on lower incomes following the 2008 Act is as great as the increase in property wealth for people on higher incomes since the Credit Crunch. This is a huge and progressive re-distribution of wealth, which will continue for years to come.
The generally accepted story of the New Labour years is that they did lots of stuff about tackling poverty but largely didn’t really do much on inequality, despite passing progressive legislation like the National Minimum Wage. Peter Mandelson’s view that he was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes” has come to define our view of the New Labour era as one where tackling inequality wasn’t a priority.
In retrospect the 2008 Act may well turn out to be one of the most significant pieces of redistributive legislation of the last few decades, worth more in total than the NMW. I honestly find it incredible that such a huge change in wealth distribution could have happened without my noticing, but I don’t think I am alone. After all pensions are boring, and most people I know aren’t affected by the changes in the 2008 Act.
In the meantime I new set of developers have announced another round of flat building in Leeds. 9,000 more flats on the Quarry Hill site, with unrivalled views of Britains finest example of neo-Stalinist architecture.
What could possibly go wrong?
https://www.ft.com/content/4c5ce3fc-0753-11e8-9650-9c0ad2d7c5b5
https://www.theguardian.com/social-care-network/2018/mar/21/jeremy-hunt-social-care-reform