The Value Flow Project
Where your money goes

Your house didn’t
build itself. Your
landlord didn’t earn this.

Since 2000, the average UK home has gained £215,000 in value16. The average wage has gained £20,300.

No one worked for that gap. It came from you.

This site is a quick read. It shows where the money actually went, why your wage can’t catch up, who’s on the other side of the trade, and the one policy that fixes it.

Show me the gapWhat to do about it
The ratio
10:1

For every £1 the average wage has gained since 2000, the average house has gained £10. You can work harder. You can’t earn a tenfold raise.

ONS Housing Affordability 2025; ONS ASHE annual earnings.16

The gap

The house pulled away. You can’t catch it.

Two lines, twenty-five years. The top one is the value of an average UK house. The bottom one is an average full-time salary. The red area in between is the thing nobody worked for — and the thing your landlord pocketed.

£0k£100k£200k£300k200020052010201520202025£300k£39.3kthe gap
Average UK house price (ONS HPI)Average full-time salary (ONS ASHE)
£215,000
What the average house gained while doing nothing.
£20,300
What the average full-time wage gained over the same 25 years.
7 years
How long you’d need to live on zero and save every payslip to match the house’s gain.

A wage rise can’t close this. A second job can’t close this. The thing pulling away is bigger than the thing that catches it.

Sources: ONS Housing Affordability in England and Wales, 202516; ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings; ONS House Price Index long-run series.

Where does the money come from

Houses don’t build cars. People build cars.

When your landlord’s flat goes up £20,000 in a year, where did that £20,000 come from?

Not from the flat. The flat didn’t do anything. It sat there. It didn’t plaster its own walls or fix its own boiler or pay its own council tax. Nobody on the planet woke up early to make a flat earn money.

The only thing that creates value is human work. Every pound your landlord made on that flat was earned by someone, somewhere — the person who’ll pay the next rent, the buyer who’ll one day take out a thirty-year mortgage, the worker whose wages the council taxes to pay for the road outside.

Ownership doesn’t create anything. It captures what was already created. A landlord is a person standing between you and a roof, charging admission. A shareholder is a person standing between a worker and what the worker made, charging admission. A landowner is a person standing between a farmer and the soil, charging admission.

Labour creates the value. Ownership takes it.

Who’s on the other side

The whole gap fits in a football stadium.

“The rich” isn’t a vibe. It’s a number. In the UK, the people who own more than £10 million in net wealth — the people whose flats and shares and yachts and family offices have been compounding while your rent went up — come to about 21,200 adults. That’s 0.04% of the country21. You could fit them in Wembley with seats to spare.

UK household wealth, by shareTop 1% · 23%
Bottom 50%Middle 40%Next 9%Top 1%
23%
of all UK household wealth is held by the top 1%19,23.
~21,200
UK adults hold more than £10 million in net wealth. That’s the group a wealth tax would touch.
80%
of UK millionaires themselves support a 2% wealth tax on wealth above £10m, in surveys by Patriotic Millionaires UK21.
We’ve been here before

Two hundred years, two squeezes, one settlement in the middle.

Working people in Britain have been squeezed like this before. Not by rent — by bread. The way out then is a clue to the way out now.

Food share of a working-class budgetShare of UK wealth held by the top 1%
Bread squeezeLong settlementAsset squeeze0%25%50%75%1825185018751900192519501975200020251846 · Corn Laws repealed1945 · Welfare state1980 · Right to Buy

Sources: 19th-century budget studies in Past & Present26, Feinstein on real wages24, Allen on Engels’ Pause25, WID.world UK long-run wealth series23, and Advani-Summers-Tarrant corrected modern estimates19.

1815–1846 · The bread squeeze

Three-quarters of a worker’s pay went on food.

In the 1830s and 1840s, agricultural labourers spent 75% of household income on food and 55% on bread alone26. The Corn Laws — tariffs that propped up grain prices for landlords — were the keystone of the squeeze. Workers couldn’t vote. The answer wasn’t a wage rise. It was Chartism: three petitions, six demands, mass agitation. Parliament rejected every petition. It repealed the Corn Laws anyway, in 1846, because the threat in the streets had become too expensive to ignore.

1870–1979 · The long settlement

Cheap food, legal unions, a welfare state.

From the 1870s, American grain and refrigerated meat crashed food prices24. Unions were legalised (1871, 1875, 1906). Working men got the vote (1867, 1884). Real wages rose for a century. After 1945 the Attlee government built council housing, the NHS, and a welfare state. The top 1%’s share of wealth fell from ~70% before World War One to ~18% by 198023. For three generations, the wage channel actually worked: a wage rise, a council flat, a pension. That was normal. That was new.

1979–now · The asset squeeze

They sold the council flats and stopped building.

Right to Buy without replacement. Financial deregulation. Mortgage credit became infinite, council housing became scarce, and asset prices took off. Real wages have been flat or falling since 2008. The top 1% wealth share is back to 23% and rising19,22. This time the squeeze isn’t food — it’s the asset stock itself. Cheaper bread can’t fix it. A wage rise can’t fix it. Only a change in who owns the assets can.

Last time, it took a generation of fighting and a world war.

This time, it takes a vote and a tax.

What to do about it

A 2% wealth tax on wealth over £10 million.

Designed by Tax Justice UK and Patriotic Millionaires UK. Endorsed by 80% of UK millionaires themselves. Affects 0.04% of the country. Raises around £24 billion a year20,21.

Threshold
£10m

Net wealth. Your house, your pension, your shares — minus debts. Hits no one whose money you’d recognise.

Rate
2%

Per year, on the wealth above £10m. Less than half the typical return on a UK property portfolio. The compounding still works. It just slows down.

Raises
£24bn

Per year. Enough to build hundreds of thousands of council homes. Enough to undo most of the public-services damage since 2010.

There is a bigger version. The Wealth Tax Commission — a panel of LSE economists, IFS researchers, and tax barristers — modelled a one-off tax on wealth above £500,000, 1% a year for five years. It would raise £260 billion over the five years18. We’re advocating the smaller one because it’s the one with overwhelming public support, millionaire endorsement, and the cleanest political path. Either way, the wage channel is broken. The only lever left is the state.

The full programme

A wealth tax is the headline, not the whole answer. The same group of researchers and campaigners has costed nine more reforms that, taken together, raise over £60 billion a year20:

  • · Land Value Tax replacing council tax + business rates
  • · Capital gains taxed at income-tax rates
  • · National Insurance on investment income
  • · Inheritance tax loopholes closed
  • · Non-dom regime ended (in motion)
  • · Pension tax relief flat-rated
  • · Bank levy restored to pre-2015 level
  • · Council housing build at scale
  • · Private renters’ bill: open-ended tenancies, rent rises capped to wages

None of this is utopian. Almost all of it has been in mainstream UK political discussion in the last five years22,18.

Send this to one person who’s
paying rent.

That’s the ask. The argument only works if it leaves the phone. Then write to your MP and tell them you want a wealth tax on wealth over £10 million. They’ll tell you no one’s asking. Be the person who asked.

References

The sources, numbered.

Every numbered superscript on this page links down to its entry below. Click any title to open the published source.

  1. 1.Cockshott, W. Paul, and Allin Cottrell. "The Scientific Status of the Labour Theory of Value." Paper presented at the Eastern Economic Association, Washington, DC, 1997.
  2. 2.Cockshott, Paul, and Allin Cottrell. "Robust Correlations between Prices and Labour Values: A Comment." Cambridge Journal of Economics 29, no. 2 (2005): 309–316.
  3. 3.Shaikh, Anwar. "The Transformation from Marx to Sraffa." In Ricardo, Marx, Sraffa: The Langston Memorial Volume, edited by Ernest Mandel and Alan Freeman, 43–84. London: Verso, 1984.
  4. 4.Ochoa, Eduardo M. "Values, Prices, and Wage-Profit Curves in the U.S. Economy." Cambridge Journal of Economics 13, no. 3 (1989): 413–429.
  5. 5.Zachariah, Dave. "Labour Value and Equalisation of Profit Rates: A Multi-Country Study." Indian Development Review 4, no. 1 (2006): 1–21.
  6. 6.Fröhlich, Nils. "Labour Values, Prices of Production and the Missing Equalisation Tendency of Profit Rates: Evidence from the German Economy." Cambridge Journal of Economics 37, no. 5 (2013): 1107–1126.
  7. 7.Işıkara, Güney, and Patrick Mokre. "Price-Value Deviations and Codetermination of Values and Prices of Production: Evidence from 42 Countries." New School for Social Research Working Paper 2003, 2020.
  8. 8.Kliman, Andrew. "The Law of Value and Laws of Statistics: Sectoral Values and Prices in the U.S. Economy, 1977–97." Cambridge Journal of Economics 26, no. 3 (2002): 299–311.
  9. 9.Kliman, Andrew. "Spurious Value–Price Correlations: Some Additional Evidence and Arguments." Research in Political Economy 21 (2004): 223–238.
  10. 10.Díaz, Emilio, and Rubén Osuna. "Indeterminacy in Price–Value Correlation Measures." Empirical Economics 33, no. 3 (2007): 389–399.
  11. 11.Tsoulfidis, Lefteris, and Theodore Mariolis. "Labour Values, Prices of Production and the Effects of Income Distribution: Evidence from the Greek Economy." Economic Systems Research 19, no. 4 (2007): 425–437.
  12. 12.Cheng, Hao, and Bangxi Li. "Testing the Labour Theory of Value in the Chinese Economy." Review of Radical Political Economics 52, no. 1 (2020): 47–69.
  13. 13.Valle Baeza, Alejandro, Gloria Martínez González, and Iván Mendieta Muñoz. "Prices and Values: Test of a Model for the Mexican Economy." Investigación Económica 73, no. 289 (2014): 79–104.
  14. 14.Sraffa, Piero. Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities: Prelude to a Critique of Economic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960.
  15. 15.Bureau of Economic Analysis. "Input-Output Accounts Data."
  16. 16.Office for National Statistics. "Housing Affordability in England and Wales: 2025." Statistical bulletin, March 2025.
  17. 17.Office for National Statistics. "Private Rent and House Prices, UK: March 2026." Price Index of Private Rents, monthly release.
  18. 18.Advani, Arun, Emma Chamberlain, and Andy Summers. A Wealth Tax for the UK. Final Report of the Wealth Tax Commission. London: London School of Economics, December 2020.
  19. 19.Advani, Arun, Andy Summers, and Hannah Tarrant. "Measuring Top Wealth Shares in the UK." Working paper, 2025.
  20. 20.Tax Justice UK and Patriotic Millionaires UK. "Six Wealth Tax Policies That Could Raise £50 Billion." Policy briefing, 2024.
  21. 21.Patriotic Millionaires UK. "Ten Tax Reforms and Closed Loopholes to Raise £50 Billion." Policy recommendations.
  22. 22.Resolution Foundation. "Inequality Control: Why Wealth Inequality Has Not Increased While Asset Prices Have Soared." Briefing, November 2024.
  23. 23.World Inequality Database. "United Kingdom — Top 1% Net Personal Wealth Share, 1900–present." WID.world data series.
  24. 24.Feinstein, Charles H. "Pessimism Perpetuated: Real Wages and the Standard of Living in Britain during and after the Industrial Revolution." Journal of Economic History 58, no. 3 (1998): 625–658.
  25. 25.Allen, Robert C. "Engels' Pause: Technical Change, Capital Accumulation, and Inequality in the British Industrial Revolution." Explorations in Economic History 46, no. 4 (2009): 418–435.
  26. 26."Diets, Hunger and Living Standards During the British Industrial Revolution." Past & Present 239, no. 1 (2018): 71–111.
  27. 27.Stevenson, Gary. Public statements on wealth taxation, GarysEconomics YouTube channel and Wikipedia summary. "Tax wealth, not work" — proposes 1–2% annual wealth tax on net wealth above £10 million.
Methodology & datasets

How we know this.

Every chart on this page is reproducible. The primary datasets, the numbered citations, and the labour-value source code are all open.

About

The Value Flow Project.

A small open-source project that publishes UK inequality data in plain language. Built and maintained independently.

Every chart on the site is reproducible. Every number cites its source. The argument here is informed by the public work of Gary Stevenson, the Wealth Tax Commission, Tax Justice UK, Patriotic Millionaires UK, the Resolution Foundation, the Equality Trust, the World Inequality Database, and the empirical research programme on value and prices begun by Anwar Shaikh and continued by Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell.

The site doesn’t take donations and isn’t a charity. The point of writing it down is so you can read it, share it, and argue with it. If a number is wrong or a citation is off, open an issue on GitHub.

Source code, datasets and replication scripts: github.com/daniel-mf-92/how-value-flows.