As Britons grapple with the rising cost of living crisis, The Sunday Times Rich List 2022 has hailed Chancellor Rishi Sunak as the richest politician in the UK, placed at number 222. His wife Akshata Murty, whose father co-founded the IT behemoth Infosys, made the annual list for the first time with their joint £730 million ($911 million, 861 million euros) fortune. It comes after last month Mr Sunak’s wife, the daughter of an Indian IT billionaire, was found to be using “non-dom” status to avoid paying UK tax on her hefty overseas income – although she later agreed to pay UK taxes on all her earnings. Along with the Sunak, Saket Burman of Dabur group, Geeta Gupta-Fisker and Henrik Fisker are the new entrants into the Rich List.
The list features 15 Indian-origin tycoons. Steel baron Lakshmi Niwas Mittal (down by one rank from last year) and Biocon founder Kiran Mazumdar Shaw have also made it to the list.
This year's Sunday Times Rich List claims there are now 177 billionaires in Britain which are up by 6 from 2021. This means that there are now more billionaires in the UK than ever before despite the surging cost of living. The combined wealth of the UK billionaires is £653.122 billion, up £55.853 billion - 9.4 per cent, on the total wealth of the billionaires in last year’s Rich List.
An analysis reported that this year’s list also says that the richest people in Britain have increased their fortunes by 8% over the past year, which puts their combined wealth for the past 12 months alone at a colossal £710billion. The top 250 entrants in the list this year are also richer than all 1,000 entries back in 2017.
The Sunday Times Rich List is a list of the 1,000 wealthiest people or families resident in the United Kingdom ranked by net wealth. The list is updated annually in April and published as a magazine supplement by the British national Sunday newspaper The Sunday Times since 1989. This year, the list of Britain’s 250 richest people or families features far fewer Russian billionaires due to the ongoing turmoil between Ukraine and Russia that has impacted the global economy amid an ongoing global pandemic.
The 2022 Sunday Times Rich List has revealed that billionaire brothers Sri and Gopi Hinduja are the wealthiest people in the UK. The annual list showed that the pair, who run the Mumbai-based conglomerate Hinduja Group, saw their fortune jump by more than £11 billion. Behind them is Sir James Dyson, who founded the vacuum cleaner, and his family, who are worth an estimated £23bn.
Defending Sunak, Secretary of State for International Trade of United Kingdom Anne Mary Trevelyan said: “Yes, I believe he does. He is a man of great intelligence who comes from a family who have given him incredibly good values. And that’s why he’s coming into politics in order to try and help his country to be the best that he can be I have great confidence in what I do want to see is to make sure that those tools, those shared those that shared spending that we all make to support those most vulnerable, is as effective as possible. The fact that his wife’s family, in particular, have had incredible success through incredible hard work and her father has built up an extraordinary business is not something that we should criticise.”
After being struck by a global pandemic, the picture of poverty at the start of 2022 looked absolutely grim. According to Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), more than one in five of the UK population (22%) are in poverty– 14.5 million people. Of these, 8.1 million are working-age adults, 4.3 million are children and 2.1 million are pensioners. When we use the term poverty we are using the relative poverty rate (after housing costs) to measure poverty. Child poverty continues to rise. The latest data tells us that almost one in three children in the UK are living in poverty (31%). Nearly half of children in lone-parent families live in poverty, compared with one in four of those in couple families.
These are the 20 richest people in the UK according to the Rich List are:
- Sri and Gopi Hinduja and family – £28.47 billion
- Sir James Dyson and family – £23 billion
- David and Simon Reuben and family – £22.26 billion
- Sir Leonard Blavatnik – £20 billion
- Guillaume Pousaz – £19.26 billion
- Lakshmi Mittal and family – £17 billion
- Christoph Henkel and family – £15 billion
- Guy, George, Alannah and Galen Weston and family – £13.5 billion
- Kirsten and Jorn Rausing – £12 billion
- Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken and Michel de Carvalho – £11.42 billion
- Michael Platt – £10 billion
- Alisher Usmanov – £10 billion
- The Duke of Westminster and the Grosvenor family – £9.73 billion
- Barnaby and Merlin Swire and family – £9.6 billion
- Marit, Lisbet, Sigrid and Hans Rausing – £9.49 billion
- Anil Agarwal – £9.2 billion
- Denise, John and Peter Coates – £8.64 billion
- John Fredriksen and family – £8.31 billion
- Mikhail Fridman – £8.22 billion
- Moshe Kantor – £8 billion
Some of Lancashire's billionaires have bagged a spot on the Northwest Rich List published. Blackburn's billionaire brothers, Mohsin and Zuber Issa claimed the middle spot ranking fifth place out of ten. The brothers started off their empire with EG group and now also own Asda within their Blackburn-headquartered company. Together, their net worth is £4.73bn which is up Up £50m.
Concerns for the future
As per the findings of the report by JRF, another negative effect that is new from late 2021 is the rise in inflation, which is forecast by the OBR to be above 3% until April 2023. Social renters have the highest rate of poverty at 46% reflecting their comparatively lower incomes, while a third of private renters are in poverty.
Low-income households have less of a buffer against rising costs or any unexpected expenses, given they are less likely than other households to have savings, with just over a third of people in the poorest fifth of households having liquid savings of less than £250 compared with 1 in 6 of the overall population. People in the poorest fifth of households are more likely to say that they are finding their existing debt a burden, with around half of people in the poorest fifth of households describing their debt in this way compared with just under 1 in 3 overall. In terms of how all this plays out for future poverty levels, it seems clear that out-of-work families will fare worse than low-income families in work.
There is already a large existing gap in the latest data, with only 6% of working-age adults in families where all adults are in full-time work being in poverty compared with almost half of working-age adults in workless families. It is worth stating that many of the out-of-work families at risk of being left behind are not expected to work due to their disability or caring responsibilities, factors in themselves increasing the likelihood of poverty, with a gap of around 12 percentage points in poverty rates between disabled and non-disabled people. This year no Asian names featured in the Giving away list.
