Big pay increases for highly paid workers in London and the south-east have masked real wage cuts across large swathes of the economy and led to a widening in the UK’s geographical earnings gap, a leading thinktank has said.
A study from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) found that while workers in some sectors – such as manufacturing, education and hospitality – had fallen in inflation-adjusted terms, there had been significant rises for those employed in the business services sector, the City and IT.
