Nottingham is the city with the lowest incomes in the UK, where residents’ take-home pay is only one-fifth of the disposable income enjoyed by people in west London.
The average household income per head, once taxes and benefits are taken into account, is only £12,232 in Nottingham, compared to £58,816 in Kensington and Chelsea, and Hammersmith and Fulham in west London.
The average for the whole of the UK is £19,432 per head, according to official government figures that reveal the vast gulf in living standards across Britain.
The data reveals not only large differences between regions but also the disparity within those regions. A few miles east of Hammersmith and Fulham, household disposable incomes per head plummet by two-thirds to £19,261 in Newham and Hackney.
In the north-west, incomes are lowest in Blackburn, at £12,450, little more than half of those in wealthy Cheshire East (£22,025).
In the south, incomes are lowest in Southampton (£14,797) and Luton (£14,889), while the East and West Surrey districts make up Britain’s most well-off county, with incomes averaging above £28,000.
The reasons behind Nottingham’s ranking as the lowest-income city in the country are complex. The east Midlands city had a strong and prosperous textile industry during the Industrial Revolution but it declined rapidly during the 1950s and 60s.
In 2014 it was named the city with the highest proportion of workless households in the UK. More than a third of children in the city live in poverty, according to a report by End Child Poverty earlier this year, with 52% of children in the Arboretum ward living below the breadline.
The figures issued on Thursday are for 2016, the latest available data at a local authority level.
They also reveal that while average incomes rose marginally on a national level, in many parts of the country they fell. The biggest fall in incomes in 2016 was in Tees Valley in the north-east, a byword for heavy industry, where they fell by 1.6% in real terms after inflation.
Meanwhile, real incomes rose by 1.6% in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, at the heart of Britain’s hi-tech industry.
The Office for National Statistics said that during 2016 “gross disposable household income per head grew in all regions except the north-east and north-west, which fell by 0.6% and 0.2% respectively. The largest percentage increase was in the east of England at 1.3%”.