The truth about young people’s pay? It’s up, significantly, over a generation

Right at the start of filming for Dispatches on the generation wealth gap (8pm on Ch4 tonight), we were working around a striking claim: that the young were so shafted that people in their 20s are earning less now that they were 20 years ago. I asked the Office for National Statistics to check this out and when their figures came back, it was the opposite to what I expected – and to what everyone seems to believe. Not only are the 20-somethings paid more, but their disposable income is up by a third on where it was two decades ago.

The idea that the young ones are paid substantially more than their parents contradicts all established wisdom. But the ONS had never released the research before, so no-one knew. The Resolution Foundation, chaired by David Willetts, is midway through a commission on this topic and released a report called the ‘Stagnation Generation’.