Middle income earners 'neglected'

Middle income workers have lost out sharply compared with better-off professionals, the TUC has said

Workers on "middle" incomes have lost out sharply compared with better-off professionals and now fear losing their jobs and homes, a new report has warned.

Research for the TUC suggested that politicians and commentators had got middle Britain "badly wrong".

It said the failure of successive governments to deliver for middle earners explained the current outrage with politics following the MPs' expenses scandal.

A study of more than 1,000 workers in the median income bracket showed their annual pay was just under £20,000 a year, a "long way" from the comfortable middle-class incomes now referred to as Middle Britain, said the report.

Median earners had seen their income go up less than average over the last 30 years, increasing by 60% since 1979 compared with rises of 78% for the better off, according to the TUC.

TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said: "For all the talk of middle Britain, those on real middle incomes got left behind under the Conservatives, were left out of Labour's boom that has now busted into recession, and are now fearing for their jobs and homes as unemployment bites.

"No wonder there is so much anger at a political system that has seen the super-rich soar away, while too many MPs look to be more interested in joining the wealthy rather than standing up to them.

"Thirty years ago Britain was one of Europe's most equal societies, now it is one of the most unequal. Far from the middle being unaffected by the growing wealth and income gap, they have slipped behind not just the rich but the better-off professional classes."

The report's author Stewart Lansley added: "This may stand as one of the big failings of the last 30 years. Given the political rhetoric - that the policies on offer would secure middle-income Britain a bigger share of growing national wealth and well-being - one might assume that the middle-income Britain of the 1970s and 1980s has genuinely been transformed into the well-to-do middle Britain of current imagining. In fact, this is not the case."