75% of people (including 72% of 2019 Tory voters) are concerned that people with net wealth of £10m or more have too much influence on the political system

69% of people are concerned that some people in the UK are this wealthy while others live in poverty, and 65% about unequal opportunities to accumulate wealth

68% of people (including 64% of 2019 Tory voters) think the government should be doing more to tax high net worth individuals (those with £10m or more)

Asked about sources of wealth, people are most positive about entrepreneurs, followed by landlords, and most negative about city traders and old-money heirs

Summaries

Wealth inequality is twice as high as income inequality. The richest fifth of the population own 63% of the country’s wealth; the poorest fifth own 0.6%. Men have 40% more wealth than women. White households are four times more likely to have more than £500,000 in wealth than black African households.

Total net household wealth as a share of national income has roughly doubled in the last thirty years. Most increases in wealth over recent decades have been ‘passive’ (driven by increases in the asset values of existing wealth) rather than ‘active’ (due to saving or other activities suggesting the application of talent through hard work). Inheritances play an increasingly important role in determining life chances and outcomes.

Wealth inequality is a barrier to the achievement of all five of the fair necessities. It allows poverty to reach unacceptable levels, undermining fair essentials. It leads to educational and job market inequalities, undermining fair opportunities. It undervalues many forms of work, undermining the social contract and fair rewards. If not properly taxed, it weakens public services, undermining fair exchange. And it leads to egregious inequalities across class, racial, gender, regional and generational divides across every aspect of our society and economy – from democracy and the environment to housing, health and criminal justice – undermining fair treatment.

For all of the debate about economic growth, there isn’t a shortage of wealth in Britain; if anything, there is a surplus. But it is very unevenly distributed.

What do people in Britain think about wealth inequality in the context of fairness?

There is plenty of research to suggest that views are complex and nuanced. People are concerned about the causes and consequences of wealth inequality - as well as income inequality and other forms of inequality that are interdependent, such as racial, gender and regional inequality. But at the same time, many people believe that we live in a meritocratic society, and that success (and therefore wealth) owes more to individual factors, such as hard work, than to structural factors, such as barriers to opportunity. And people see wealth as aspirational, in part because it can provide security for them and their families in an insecure (and unequal) world.

We set out to explore two questions that have received less attention. Firstly, how much do attitudes vary based on the source of the wealth, and in particular whether it was earned through work or acquired in other ways (such as inheritance, or rent)? Secondly, what do people think about fairness in relation to people with net wealth of £10 million or more (high net worth individuals), and what might this mean for policy solutions such as taxes on wealth?

We asked people for their views about seven different characters, each of which have accumulated £5 million in a different way. For each character, we asked five questions, each with two possible answers (below), and asked respondents to pick the answer they most agreed with in each case (or neither, if they were unsure).

Green bars show the percentage of respondents who agreed with the first statement, red bars the second (grey bars mean unsure). To reduce respondent fatigue, each respondent only answered questions about three of the seven characters, chosen at random.

Accumulating wealth in this way…

The new-money heir

…has inherited £5m from their parents, who had built up a successful business from scratch