The gap between the rich and the poor is too wide – but we’ve got to get the facts right

New statistics on income stubbornly refuse to confirm what ‘everyone knows’, which is that inequality is growing, writes John Rentoul

All the evidence is that overall income inequality has not changed significantly for 30 years (Getty)

The gap between the rich and the poor in the UK has been broadly unchanged in the three decades since 1990, and yet the belief that it is widening – which was true in the 1980s – has persisted. Part of the reason for that is that people think the gap is too wide, and that injustice persists. Because poor people continue to suffer, it seems reasonable to assume that things are getting worse.

At the moment, with the pressures on the cost of living, things are getting worse for poor people – but they are getting worse for everybody, and that is the other problem with questions of poverty and inequality. Any sensible definition of poverty has to be relative, because what matters to people is how they compare with those around them, but these are complex things to measure, and difficult to reduce to easily comparable numbers.

However, Britain has higher quality statistics than most countries, and the most recent figures for people’s incomes have just been published. There are two different sources of official figures. This morning, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) published its survey known as “Households on Below Average Incomes”, which covers the period up to last April.