When I was younger, I was always hearing about “yuppies” (young, urban professionals), a prosperous class of upwardly mobile, status-chasing people working in major cities. It was already a vintage term by the time I was conscious of it, it having been forged in the 1980s, when these people were viewed as the major beneficiaries of Margaret Thatcher’s “big bang”. Now it’s disappeared altogether. Instead, these days you hear about the white-collar “Henrys” (high-earning, not rich yet) – a cohort near-identical in demographic, profession and status-obsession, but who are now apparently the overlooked, and the hard-done-by, of our current political settlement.
One of the big contentions for Henrys, as you may have learned recently, is the claim that a £100,000 salary no longer pays; in fact, it is at this point that they face a financial double whammy. High earners lose £1 from their personal allowance for every £2 they earn over £100,000, meaning that more of their salary will be taxed at a higher rate. It is also at this salary point that Henrys in England lose access to 30 hours of free childcare for children aged between nine months and four years old, and £2,000 per year for under-12s. Add to this that these Henrys who started university after 2006 are more likely to be paying off their entire student loan for longer, and there are clear incentives against higher earnings after a certain point.
