AUSTERITY-hit workers are now a whopping £11,000 a year worse off following a decade and a half of wage stagnation, a major think tank warned today.
In new figures shared with BBC Panorama, the Resolution Foundation said that, had salaries continued to grow at the pace seen before the 2008 financial crash, the average worker would now be making £11,000 more per year, when adjusted for inflation.
Incomes for the typical British household have also fallen further behind those in Germany, the independent organisation added, from more than £500 per annum 15 years ago to a mammoth £4,000 now.
Chief executive Torsten Bell told the BBC that wage stagnation since the post-2008 recession, sparked by a reckless deregulated banking sector, is “almost completely unprecedented.
“Nobody who’s alive and working in the British economy today has ever seen anything like this.
“This is definitely not what normal looks like — this is what failure looks like.”
The TUC has repeatedly warned of the biggest slump in take-home pay for more than 200 years since the end of the Napoleonic wars in the early 19th century.
Plummeting real-terms pay has coincided with more than a decade of Tory austerity, with government departments and public services suffering drastic spending cuts.
Despite 40-year high double-digit inflation, ministers and Bank of England boss Andrew Bailey have urged workers to show “wage restraint,” sparking the biggest strike wave to sweep Britain since the 1980s.
A Treasury spokesperson claimed that the economy is “more resilient than many predicted” amid government incentives to boost investment and growth, but in his spring Budget speech last week, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt acknowledged the “enormous pressure” on people’s finances.
An Ipsos poll conducted after the “fiscal event” last Wednesday found that more Brits are still concerned than reassured about their personal finances.
Just 13 per cent of people said they feel better about their cashflow situation following the former health secretary’s address to MPs, and only 12 per cent think Britain’s crippled public services are back on track.
More than a third – 35 per cent – are now more worried about the economy and the NHS, schools and other public services, as opposed to 22 per cent feeling more positive, the survey of 1,000 adults also found.
