Eleven towns and cities in the UK, including Warrington, Barnsley and Wakefield, have seen their disposable incomes rise twice as fast as the rest of the UK over the past decade, a study has found.
A report from Centre for Cities, a thinktank, showed that between 2013 and 2023, disposable income for residents of these top performing towns and cities – all in England – rose by an average of 5.2%, compared with an increase of 2.4% for urban areas in the UK overall.
The report said that if all 63 of the UK’s largest towns and cities had experienced the same rate of growth as the top 11 performers over this period, people would have pocketed an extra £3,200 on average in disposable income.
It found that the top-performing towns and cities in its report all focused on building a strong local business base and higher-skilled jobs, with a significant number of productive firms in “tradeable” industries, such as software, marketing and finance, that can sell to markets outside the local area.
Centre for Cities argued that central and local government were often too focused on piecemeal actions to improve the cost of living, such as capping bus fares or providing money for energy bills, rather than focusing on policies aimed at improving economic growth, which it said led to stronger incomes for everyone.
“By focusing on tinkering with the symptoms, the government runs the risk of losing sight of the cause,” the report said. “The problem underpinning cost of living pressures, stagnant incomes, and persistent deprivation is the lack of economic growth.”
Andrew Carter, the chief executive of the thinktank, said: “If you look at these top performers, what they focus on is increasing higher-skilled, cutting-edge jobs in their area and being very deliberate about trying to do that.”
In Barnsley, which has used its M1 corridor location to become a logistics hub, the council has opened up industrial land around motorway junctions to help activity in this space to grow, according to the report. Since 2015 the town has added 6,000 more private service jobs, a third of which are high-skilled jobs.
Other targeted interventions focused on getting its residents into jobs or training, improving public transport links and increasing the amount of affordable housing.
In Barnsley disposable income rose by 5.6% between 2013 and 2023, and in Warrington, Cheshire, by 5.3%. The highest performer was Brighton, with an 8.1% rise, followed by Worthing at 7.8% and London at 5.8%.
The report also highlighted cities that had struggled to improve living standards for its residents since in 2013. In Cambridge, for example, where residents spend 17% of their outgoings on housing on average, the thinktank found that real-terms disposable incomes had declined by 3% in total since 2013. The report said residents would have pocketed an extra £10,900 over the decade if Cambridge had matched the 11 top-performing towns and cities.
The top 11 areas also outperformed the average economic growth for urban areas of 18.4%, with an increase of 27% over the decade.
Warrington had the highest total economic growth of any of the locations, at 41%. Since 2013, both economic and disposable income growth in Warrington have been 2.2 times the national average. It was the town in the north of England with the highest disposable income, and the only city or town in this part of the country to have workplace wages above the UK average.
Carter said: “It’s about taking tough decisions. In Warrington, they’ve enabled and supported the expansion of some of their edge-of-town business parks. They’ve also taken reasonable chunks out of their green belt to build more homes, which is not an easy job. So it’s about: do you know what needs to be done, but also, are you willing to do it?”
The town or city with the highest rise in disposable income outside England was Cardiff with a 1.4% rise over the decade (the Welsh city of Newport had higher rise of 5.1%, but underperformed in economic growth, with a 14.8% rise, so was discounted from Centre for Cities’ rankings in the table), while in Scotland it was Glasgow, which still saw a decline of 2.3%. In Northern Ireland, Belfast was the top performing city or town, with a decline in disposable income of 1.5%.
• This article was amended on 26 January 2026. Warrington is a town, not a city as an earlier version said. It was also amended to clarify that while the Centre for Cities’ report covered the UK, the top performing towns and cities were all in England.
