CHASM’s Professor Karen Rowlingson and Professor Stephen McKay have published the Financial Inclusion Annual Monitoring Briefing Paper for 2018, which builds on five previous annual reports to measure changing levels of financial inclusion in Britain from 2013-2017.
This year’s briefing paper, funded by Friends Provident Foundation and Barrow Cadbury Trust, reviews evidence on the broad economic picture in Britain in terms of growth, employment, incomes and access to financial services. Accompanying the briefing paper are an associated set of infographics, representing data from a number of different datasets, to highlight the key trends in the indicators.
The research identified a number of interesting trends, such as the number of people ‘unbanked’, that is without a transactional bank account, reached an all-time low in 2017 to 1.23 million, down from 4.5 million in 2003. Also, people were saving less of their incomes in 2017 than at any time in the past 20 years. The household saving ratio in 2017 was half the level it had reached in 2009.
Another key headline of our time was that, following a long period of decline, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of people with private sector workplace pensions, since the introduction of auto enrolment in 2012. There has also been an increase in the number of people with public sector pensions since the late 1990’s.