Time to change the record for the families of Unsung Britain

Afternoon all,

It’s a pleasure to be in your inboxes once again. We published a book this week called Unsung Britain. It summarises over 18 months of work during which we considered how to improve the material realities of the 13 million working-age families across the poorest half of the country.

We decided to call the group our book is describing “unsung” because they’ve been demonstrably putting even more in – both in the form of paid work and unpaid care – but getting less back in return.

Elsewhere, it was a busy week in politics (the word “febrile” was bandied about a lot…) But what Unsung Britain reveals is that political trust in Britain has been eroded not just by the individual actions of politicians, but also by the glacial pace of living standards growth in recent decades. The families of Unsung Britain have been let down, and they’re right to be angry.

Condensing a 200-page book into a newsletter is a fool’s errand (although I did give it a go on our new Substack), but below I have highlighted a few areas that either provoked particular debate this week, or that were particularly surprising, or shocking, to me. For those who are more audio-visual inclined, we had some excellent speakers at Tuesday’s launch conference (including Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham), all of which you can catch up on here. We also hosted a podcast.

As ever, have a great weekend,

Mike
Deputy Chief Executive
Resolution Foundation 

Going solo

The key question we asked in the Unsung Britain project was: how have things changed for the poorer half of Britain over the last three decades? It’s good to step back occasionally and ask these big questions because what can be small year-on-year changes become much more substantial over the course of generations.

For example, there have been some important shifts in family formation. Our first chart shows that, among the poorer half of Britain, young adults are increasingly single and child‑free, middle‑aged adults are seeing a quiet rise in single living (although a couple with children remains the most common type of household), and older adults are seeing more late parenthood as well as an increase in living alone. So, parenthood is happening later, and to fewer people, and living alone has become more common. If the main social change in the 80s and 90s was the divorce boom, and that of the 90s and 00s was the rise of cohabitation, the big change over the last generation has been people not living together as couples at all.

Cross-country crunch 

Another question we’ve been asked a lot is ‘Where do the families of Unsung Britain live?’ There are two broad answers to this question. First, the proportion of working-age families across the poorest half of the country has risen in almost every English region and nation of the UK. This reflects the fact that incomes of working-age families have risen far less than pensioner families. The second stand-out change is the West Midlands. Back in the mid-1990s, the region was better off than the North, but poorer than the South East. But after three decades of relative economic decline, the West Midlands now has just as great a share of lower-income families as the North West and Yorkshire, and is miles behind the South. Our Economy 2030 Inquiry highlighted the poor economic performance of Birmingham and its surrounding areas; Unsung Britain shows the consequences for families’ standard of living.

Working isn’t working

One of our keynote speakers noted his concern that “far fewer people are in work than they could be”. And yet, far more of the poorer half of Britain are in paid work than used to be the case: adults in lower-income families have seen their employment rate rise by 11 percentage point since the mid-1990s, accounting for all the rise in the UK’s overall employment rate.

What has changed over time has been that work is no longer the ticket to a decent standard of living. Another speaker, Paul Gregg, summarised it thus: “back in [the 1980s and 1990s], worklessness was the problem. One earner [in a household] was enough to get you out of poverty. That is no longer true”. Our next chart shows this directly: the majority of families in poverty now have at least one person in work, and work is getting less reliable as a means of escaping poverty.

Of course there are still challenges in the labour market. Young people are more likely to be ill or disabled, chiefly through poor mental health. Although the rates of NEETs are also lower now than at the start of the millennium, a greater share is driven by mental health. I would recommend having a look at some of our excellent analysis of trends among NEETs for more on that.

Home is where the rent’s high

Housing was a key concern among our speakers and panellists. And certainly, our analysis confirms that the ‘housing crisis’ is visible in changing trends in tenure and rising housing costs.

The most dramatic change is a decline in homeownership with a mortgage, falling from around 30 per cent of poorer households in the mid‑1990s to just 17 per cent by 2023‑24. At the same time, private renting has nearly doubled to 21 per cent of families. This is particularly worrying given the high prices associated with private renting: on average, rent gobbles up 43 per cent of total post-tax income for Unsung Britain. Social renting has also declined due to reduced supply – prompting Andy Burnham to call for a new target of 500,000 new social homes by the end of this Parliament when he addressed our conference.

The chart below shows how this stark change in living circumstances is particular marked for younger adults. Of those aged between 28 and 32 in 1994-95, 46 per cent either had a mortgage or owned their homes outright. By 2023-24, this figure had as good as halved (to 24 per cent), while the proportion privately renting alone had risen sharply to 34 per cent. Those aged around 50 have always been more likely to own outright or with a mortgage, but even this group has seen a 12 per cent fall in mortgagors and a doubling in the percentage renting privately.

When it rains it pours

One element that ran through the entire project was the impact of the nation’s deteriorating health. Many disabled people rely on relatives for support, so this deterioration shapes not just the experience of the unwell but also the people who care for them. We identified an ‘unsung army’ of one million people with unpaid caring responsibilities equivalent to a full-time job. But these two populations are not always distinct: iIl‑health and caring responsibilities overlap far more than is often recognised, creating a powerful “double whammy” that drives hardship in Unsung Britain.

The chart below shows that more than one-in-three (34 per cent) adults in the poorer half of the country are either disabled or caring for someone else, and the same proportion of carers in poorer homes say that they ‘can’t work at all’ because of their duties. Often both pressures fall within the same household: 43 per cent of lower‑income families include at least one disabled person or carer, and nearly one-in-ten families in Unsung Britain contain both a carer and a disabled person. This deep overlap shows that improving the living standards of lower‑income families requires confronting the intertwined realities of ill‑health, care, and constrained work opportunities.

After the comparatively high unemployment of the 1990s, the people of Unsung Britain were asked to work harder – and they did. So far, however, that hard work has not been met by the rewards that they could have expected in earlier decades. Until rising efforts are matched by rising rewards, Britain will struggle to become a nation at ease.

But let’s end on a positive note. The high unemployment of the 90s was tackled in part by revolutionising support for working parents. If we can unleash a similar revolution for those with a disability or caring responsibilities, that would relieve a huge strain on Unsing Britain.