Will Snell | 17 February 2026
Contents
Summary findings Background: Differentiating between wealth creation and wealth extraction Polling questions Headline findings Political and demographic differences How fairness views correlate with attitudes to wealth creation and extraction Conclusion
Media
Summary findings
What does the public think about the distinction between wealth creation and wealth extraction? Do they view certain business models as inherently ‘creative’ or ‘extractive’? We carried out nationally representative polling with Opinium in January 2026 to find out.
The results show that, while there are a mixture of predictable and more surprising variations in attitudes along political and demographic lines, overall there is a clear sense that the British public are strongly opposed to business models that are seen as extractive. Particular anger is reserved for business models that are understood to exploit consumers, workers or society more broadly, including those that avoid tax or rip off consumers. There are more mixed views about businesses that cut costs by squeezing staff or suppliers. However, there is strong support for businesses that do well by creating wealth through innovation and investment in R&D.
To ensure that the polling questions were accessible and interpretable, we opted to use simplified examples of ‘creative’ and ‘extractive’ business models and practices, and we recognise that real life is more nuanced and complicated than those examples might suggest. This piece of attitudinal research is an exercise in exploring where the instincts of the public lie; more detailed policy work is needed to enable the development of a clear conceptual distinction between wealth creation and wealth extraction. However, we believe that these findings provide policymakers with a clear mandate to take action to support genuine wealth creation at the same time as cracking down on examples of wealth extraction and exploitative business models. Further research is needed to gauge levels of support for specific policy options. We will be doing much more work on wealth creation and extraction over the coming months, looking in detail at particular aspects of the issue and at a range of potential policy responses.
Background: Differentiating between wealth creation and wealth extraction
Politicians often talk about finding ways to boost ‘wealth creation’ in the pursuit of economic growth. But what do they, and we, mean by that term?
‘Wealth creation’ is often used to describe any process by which wealth is gained by certain groups, regardless of whether society as a whole benefits. We have lost a fundamental, once-acknowledged distinction between economic activity that generates genuine value for society (wealth creation) and activity that merely extracts value from existing systems, assets, or populations (wealth extraction).
At their best, well-run capitalist economies are engines of extraordinary value generation. Through innovation, risk-taking, enterprise, and investment, they produce goods and services that improve people’s lives, while creating jobs, supporting economic development and contributing to tax revenues. But in recent decades, economic activity in the UK has increasingly gravitated toward wealth extraction - the appropriation of existing value without corresponding productive contribution.
Wealth can be extracted in various ways, including monopoly power (which allows dominant firms to charge excessive prices, stifle competition, and extract economic rent from consumers and suppliers), financialisation (where companies prioritise shareholder dividends and financial engineering over investment in innovation, wages, or productive capacity), and rentierism (where wealth is accumulated by controlling scarce assets, like land, housing, or infrastructure, and extracting income without enhancing productivity).
Wealth extraction not only erodes the principle of fairness, especially the relationship between contribution and reward, but it also constrains genuine economic dynamism, widens inequality, and undermines state capacity and public faith in democratic institutions.
To address this problem, we need to recover a fundamental, once-acknowledged distinction between economic activity that generates genuine value for society (wealth creation) and activity that merely extracts value from existing systems, assets, or populations (wealth extraction). Armed with this distinction, we can better consider which types of economic activity we should incentivise and celebrate, and which we should reform or discourage.
As a first step in exploring this issue at the Fairness Foundation, we want to better understand how the public thinks about wealth creation and wealth extraction, and where the line between the two sits. To begin answering this question, we commissioned Opinium to carry out nationally representative polling in January 2026.
Polling questions
We asked respondents to comment on the acceptability (or otherwise) of the business models of eight fictional businesses, each of which had doubled their profits recently, but in very different ways:
Tocrad has developed a new type of hairdryer that is quieter, cheaper and more efficient than its rivals and has gone on to sell millions of them
Hydrome has the regional monopoly to provide water to people living in the East of England, and has been able to use its position to increase customer bills and borrow large amounts of money
Corazam has become the biggest online retailer for electronic goods and is able to use its dominant position in the market to drive down the prices it pays to its suppliers
Artizem has spent millions developing a new drug to treat Alzheimer’s and has negotiated a contract to sell it to the NHS
Cronosphere has bought up 50 struggling accountancy businesses and has reduced their costs through a major round of redundancies
Tixboss has developed an AI tool that allows it to buy up concert tickets in bulk as soon as they are released and sell them onto fans at a big markup
Credum has identified a loophole that allows football clubs to reduce their tax bills by claiming for tax credits intended for research, and is selling advice on how to exploit it to those clubs
Finawhizz has reduced its costs by restructuring its operations so that some of its employees are reclassified as self-employed workers and are not liable for employers’ national insurance
We then asked respondents why they thought that some of these businesses had unacceptable business models, asking them to choose up to two suggested reasons from the following options:
1
They are extracting wealth from society, instead of creating wealth for society
2
They are exploiting consumers, workers, or society more broadly
3
They are becoming excessively wealthy without earning that wealth
4
Poor or harmful business practices are being rewarded over better ones
5
The system is rewarding the takers, not the makers
6
The system is rewarding speculators rather than productive businesses
7
They show that the system is rigged against ordinary people
Headline findings
We see high levels of approval for profits that are considered to be ‘earned’ - especially those that arise from product innovation (Tocrad), and to a lesser extent from pharmaceutical R&D (Artizem, although support for this business might be tempered by the fact that it is selling into the NHS).
There are mixed views about profits that come about from reducing staffing costs (Cronosphere), and from establishing a dominant market position and using this to drive down supplier prices (Corazam).
Respondents have much more negative views about companies that make profits from carrying out (Finawhizz) or marketing (Credum) tax avoidance schemes. They are especially disapproving of companies whose business models are based on taking advantage of consumers who are forced to pay higher prices through either natural monopolies (Hydrome) or manufactured scarcity (Tixboss).
Browse the full results using the interactive chart below.
We asked five questions about each business: whether it is acceptable or unacceptable, whether it is mainly achieved by creating wealth (adding value to the economy overall) or by extracting wealth (taking value from others in the economy), whether it is mainly achieved by working within the system fairly or by taking advantage of the system, whether it has a positive or negative impact on society overall, and whether this kind of business activity should be encouraged or discouraged. As the table below shows, the answers across all five areas were fairly consistent.
Each column shows the ‘net approval rating’ (the percentage of respondents who selected the first answer, minus those who selected the second) for each of the five questions, for each of the eight businesses. Click on a column heading to reorder the table by that column.
When respondents were asked why they had come to form negative views about some of the fictional businesses, a range of reasons were given, but by far the most popular reason overall was that they are exploiting consumers, workers, or society more broadly.
Political and demographic differences
There are not significant differences in the levels of approval of different voter groups for the eight business models, as the graphs below show (use the arrows to shift between views by voting intention group on each of the eight businesses). However, a few interesting patterns emerge:
Labour voters are more slightly more likely than average respondents to say that all eight of the business models are acceptable, although in most cases they are also more likely to say that they are unacceptable (and less likely to sit on the fence).
Conservative voters are similarly more supportive of each business model than average, except Tixboss; they are very opposed to natural monopolies (Hydrome), but slightly more relaxed about businesses that restructure to reduce their national insurance obligations (Finawhizz).
Lib Dem voters are, like Labour voters, less likely to be undecided than the median respondent, but they are more against business models based on establishing and exploiting market dominance (Corazam).
Reform voters are broadly in line with the median respondent on almost all of the eight business models, but are more supportive than most of business models based on establishing and exploiting market dominance (Corazam).
Green voters are the most negative of all groups when it comes to most of the business models, although there is still net support for two of them, product innovation (Tocrad) and R&D (Artizem).
Attitudes also vary by demographics, including age, gender, household income, region and ethnicity. To explore these breakdowns in detail for each business, use the yellow dropdown in the first chart (with the blue background). Some key findings:
Age
Younger adults are much more relaxed about many of the business models than older adults (e.g. net disapproval of Hydrome among 18-34-year-olds is 24%, compared to 66% for those aged 65+), and also slightly less supportive of business models based on genuine innovation.
Gender
Women are generally more concerned than men about some of the more extractive business models (e.g. net disapproval of Tixboss among women is 63%, compared to 51% among men). However, there are no examples where a majority of women disagree with a majority of men.
Household income
Higher-income respondents are more favourably disposed to most of the business models than lower-income respondents, with those on lower incomes less likely to approve even of innovation-based profits but also more hostile to exploitative business models than those with higher incomes.
Region
Respondents in Scotland, the East Midlands, the East of England and the South East are particularly negative about the water monopoly (Hydrome), perhaps linked to negative perceptions of real-life companies in those regions. Welsh respondents show lower levels of support than average for several of the business models.
Ethnicity
Respondents from ethnic minority backgrounds are less supportive than white respondents of innovation‑based profits, but are more supportive than white respondents of many of the more extractive business models, even if more ethnic minority respondents oppose those business models than support them.
How fairness views correlate with attitudes to wealth creation and extraction
How might respondents’ views about fairness affect their attitudes to which of these business models are acceptable or not? To help answer this question, we included in our poll a question about whether people think we have made sufficient progress in the UK (or gone to far) on each of our five fair necessities. The next set of six charts shows the results.
When we look at the relationship between views on these different components of fairness and attitudes to the various business models (analysed by each of the political and demographic breakdowns in the polling sample), we find some interesting correlations.
The next set of charts shows four examples of strong relationships, whereby views about whether we have gone far enough on different ‘fair necessities’ seem to have some bearing on how people think about various business models.
For example, people who are more concerned about ‘fair essentials’ (people meeting their basic needs) seem less likely to say that Artizem’s business model is acceptable - perhaps because they are worried about the impacts of large pharmaceutical profits on the NHS budget and therefore on people’s ability to access healthcare.
Click on a group in the legend to filter results by that group and see how the relationship changes.
Conclusion
While there are a mixture of predictable and more surprising variations in attitudes along political and demographic lines, overall there is a clear sense that the British public are strongly opposed to business models that are seen as extractive. Particular anger is reserved for business models that are understood to exploit consumers, workers or society more broadly, including those that avoid tax or rip off consumers. There are more mixed views about businesses that cut costs by squeezing staff or suppliers. However, there is strong support for businesses that do well by creating wealth through innovation and investment in R&D. These findings provide policymakers with a clear mandate to take action to support genuine wealth creation at the same time as cracking down on examples of wealth extraction and exploitative business models. Further research is needed to gauge levels of support for specific policy options.
We will be publishing a launch report in March on why the distinction between wealth creation and wealth extraction matters, and what we can do about it. This will be followed by a set of reports on this issue, looking at specific impacts and policy responses in more detail, over the rest of 2026 and beyond.
Fieldwork was carried out by Opinium between 21 and 23 January 2026 with a nationally representative sample of 2,050 adults across the UK, weighted to nationally representative criteria and various political criteria. The order of options presented in each question was randomised. The data tables can be downloaded here. All visualisations were made using Flourish. Any minor discrepancies between Flourish charts and the data tables (<1pp) are due to the way in which Flourish rounds numbers up or down.