1% of population owns 23 % of wealth

Marketable Wealth

The wealthiest 1 per cent owned approximately a quarter of the UK's marketable wealth in 2001. In contrast, half the population shared only 5 per cent of total wealth. The results are even more skewed if housing is excluded from the estimates, suggesting this form of wealth is more evenly distributed.

Wealth is considerably less evenly distributed than income, and life cycle effects mean that this will almost always be so. People build up assets during the course of their working lives and then draw them down during the years of retirement, with the residue passing to others at their death.