People in Cheshire have £200 a month more disposable income than people in Flintshire, statistically!
Figures released today by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showing Gross Disposable Household Income (GDHI) highlights some sizeable gaps between Wales and the other UK regions.
GDHI is the amount of money that all of the individuals in the household have available for spending or saving after income is
distribution out for taxes, social contributions and benefits, the figures we are using are as an average per person regionally, in other words that’s everyone rolled up and averaged out.
GDHI per head in Wales in 2012 was £14,623 or 87.1 per cent of the UK average, up 0.5 percentage points relative to the UK average on 2011.
The figures show that In 2013 people in Wales had around £80 less per month to spend (or save) than the UK average of £1399 per month,however the gap is even grerater between England and Wales, those people living Wales fair worse by nearly 17% than those living in England, in real terms thats around £2443 per year.
Wales saw the second largest percentage increase in GDHI per head out of the UK countries and English regions between 2011 and 2012, up 3.8 per cent compared to 3.3 per cent for the UK as a whole. The largest increase was in the North East (up 4.0 per cent).
Comparing GDHI within commutable areas to Flintshire such as Cheshire, the table is perhaps how you would imagine.
People living in Cheshire have on average around £203 per month more to spend (or save) than those living in Flintshire (figures include Wrexham) – Conwy and Denbighshire (combined) are slightly better off than their Flintshire counterparts by around around 2.3%
There are many factors as to why the gap is so great, low wages is clearly an obvious one, however this could be off set in England by the cost of housing, its a little too simplistic to blame one single issue, so we wont.
Clearly we are only showing a very quick and simple snapshot of the numbers, you can get much greater detail here: wales.gov.uk and here: ons.gov.uk
And finally:
WalesOnline suggests “Wales has LOWEST disposable income in UK”
Even though they have there own embedded graph on the article telling them that Northern Ireland has the lowest disposable income, they chose to disagree with the ONS.
We added a gif for reference: