Jun 18, 2026 · 38 min · 11 segments
**The UK is one of the most geographically unequal countries in the developed world. People living in London and the South East tend to have higher incomes, higher levels of education and better…
Xiaowei XuGuest
Jonathan CribbHostUh, Xiaowei, let's kick off with unpacking that statistic that I started with about the UK being, uh, the most geographically unequal country in the world.
So that statistic refers to the disparities in productivity and wages that we see in the UK, which are really very big.
So in the latest data, we see that workers in London earned £31 per hour on average, whereas, um, in Hartlepool, in County Durham, workers only earned £18 an hour on average.
So these are big differences in wages that reflect big differences in productivity.
If we look at incomes after taxes and benefits, those differences get smaller, and if we take housing costs into account, given the housing costs in London are so high, those differences get smaller still.
But one way in which the UK really stands out is that the productivity gap between our biggest city, which is London, and our sort of next biggest cities, Manchester and Birmingham, is much larger than we see in other countries.
So there's been some convergence in recent years, but these are still really large differences.
And I think that's worth underlining, isn't it? Because if you pick a really poor area of, of the UK, no one's surprised in some sense that it's doing worse than London, but it's this point about even our big cities outside of London, it's not just Manchester, but the other cities we have, they are much further behind London than equivalent cities, not just in France, but actually across, across Europe.
And you said obviously there's income, there's income after housing costs, that's different, but actually there are other aspects of people's lives that differ loads across the UK.
Before the pandemic, um, if you look at education outcomes, around half of working age adults in London had a degree, whereas, you know, in Hartlepool it's more like one in five adults.
So healthy life expectancy in London, um, was 63 years in the latest data, compared to 57 years in the Northeast.
So what that means is that, you know, people in London can expect to live six more years, um, in good health than, than people in the Northeast.
Uh, Xiaowei, let's kick off with unpacking that statistic that I started with about the UK being, uh, the most geographically unequal country in the world.
So that statistic refers to the disparities in productivity and wages that we see in the UK, which are really very big.
So in the latest data, we see that workers in London earned £31 per hour on average, whereas, um, in Hartlepool, in County Durham, workers only earned £18 an hour on average.
So these are big differences in wages that reflect big differences in productivity.
If we look at incomes after taxes and benefits, those differences get smaller, and if we take housing costs into account, given the housing costs in London are so high, those differences get smaller still.
But one way in which the UK really stands out is that the productivity gap between our biggest city, which is London, and our sort of next biggest cities, Manchester and Birmingham, is much larger than we see in other countries.
So there's been some convergence in recent years, but these are still really large differences.
And I think that's worth underlining, isn't it? Because if you pick a really poor area of, of the UK, no one's surprised in some sense that it's doing worse than London, but it's this point about even our big cities outside of London, it's not just Manchester, but the other cities we have, they are much further behind London than equivalent cities, not just in France, but actually across, across Europe.
And you said obviously there's income, there's income after housing costs, that's different, but actually there are other aspects of people's lives that differ loads across the UK.
Before the pandemic, um, if you look at education outcomes, around half of working age adults in London had a degree, whereas, you know, in Hartlepool it's more like one in five adults.
So healthy life expectancy in London, um, was 63 years in the latest data, compared to 57 years in the Northeast.
So what that means is that, you know, people in London can expect to live six more years, um, in good health than, than people in the Northeast.
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