Levels of inequality in the UK have returned to heights last experienced at the start of the Second World War, Professor Danny Dorling will set out in giving the Royal Statistical Society’s Beveridge Memorial Lecture on Wednesday, 27 June 2012.

In his lecture Professor Dorling will particularly concentrate on the rise in social inequalities since the 1970s. Among the statistics he will highlight are those showing that the richest one per cent of people take fifteen per cent of all income in 2012, compared to six per cent in 1979.

In advance of the lecture, Professor Dorling said:

“If we look back about 100 years, we can see that inequality in the UK did drop significantly in the 70 years from 1910-1979.

“More than half of that drop in inequality took place prior to 1939. Since 1979 these inequalities have risen dramatically and continue to rise.

“The last time the best-off took as big a share of all income as they do today was in 1940, two years before the publication of the Beveridge Report, which became the basis of the UK’s welfare state after the Second World War.

“Even looking at the next-most well-off people, the gap between them and the richest is growing.

“In the early 1940s, the ‘9%’ - the rest of the best-off ten per cent less the richest one per cent - were paid an average salary of 2.4 times average incomes, the same as in 1959, 1969 and 1973. But as inequalities rose, by 1990 this ‘9%’ were paid three times average incomes and that continued until 2007.

“However, for the last five years their share has been dropping towards that 2.4 historic average. As each year passes, and the richest one per cent get richer still, the rest of the best-off ten per cent increasingly have a little more in common with the remaining nine-tenths of society, and less and less in common with those at the very top.

“Inequalities are complex statistics. But the harm that comes from living with the consequences of great inequality is often more easily understood. What may not be so well appreciated is how recently the divide between just one per cent of people and the remainder has rapidly grown to be so stark, and how more people are all in it together as a consequence.”

Royal Statistical Society Executive Director, Hetan Shah, added:

“The Royal Statistical Society was founded to use statistics to cast light on the social issues of the day. Danny Dorling’s work on inequality continues in the tradition of key figures from the Society such as William Beveridge, who was a president of the Society and in whose memory this Lecture was established, and social researcher Charles Booth, who was also a Society president and the first winner of the Guy Medal in Gold.”

Professor Danny Dorling’s research focuses on improving the understanding of the changing social, political and medical geographies of Britain and further afield, concentrating on social and spatial inequalities to life chances and how these may be narrowed. He has written and edited a number of influential books in the field of social inequality, including You Think You Know About Britain? and more recently Fair Play: A Reader on Social Justice.