More figures about regional inequality from the ONS. This time it\’s Gross Disposable Household Income.
The total represents the cash left after that person has paid his or her mortgage interest payments, taxes, including council tax, rent, insurance and pension contributions.
So we\’ve already stripped housing costs out of this, which is possibly the largest regional variation in costs. But we\’re still, as with the earlier figures, looking at incomes without adjusting for variations in regional costs.
The ONS said the average resident of west inner London had disposable income of £25,700 in 2006……The equivalent worker in Nottingham, Kingston-upon-Hull and Blackburn earned just over £10,000 after these non-discretionary payments.
So we\’ve got here a measure of income inequality across regions,. which again seems to bolster my thought that the high levels of inequality seen across the country are based, at least in part, on such regional factors. But to find the differences in consumption inequality, we\’d need regional price levels, and as Matthew has said, good luck with finding those numbers on the ONS site.