The wealth of Britain’s 157 billionaires is now equivalent to more than a fifth of the country’s entire GDP – a fivefold increase since 1990, when 15 billionaires held wealth equivalent to just 4% of GDP. The Equality Trust, which analysed this year’s Sunday Times Rich List to reach the finding, describes the trend as Britain’s “ghost GDP”: headline economic growth that is increasingly disconnected from the lived reality of most people’s lives.
The analysis lands in a specific political moment. The Labour leadership race now underway has inequality at its centre – with Andy Burnham’s programme explicitly addressing what Rayner this week called “an economy rigged against working people,” as we reported in her bombshell Sunday statement. Simultaneously, questions about the concentration of political funding in the hands of a tiny number of ultra-wealthy individuals – most prominently Christopher Harborne’s £22 million to Farage and his parties – have raised the specific question of whether political power itself is being captured by billionaire wealth, as we have reported across our full investigation of the Harborne relationship.
The numbers
In 1989, when the Sunday Times published its first rich list, 15 billionaires held a total of £27 billion – approximately 4 pence in every pound of GDP. Today, 157 billionaires hold just under £670 billion – more than 22 pence in every pound of GDP.
The trajectory is not linear. Globally, billionaire wealth has grown from 2.5% to 14.1% of GDP since 1990. Britain’s trajectory – from 4% to 22% – is considerably more extreme than the global average.
The Sunday Times Rich List itself has changed in ways that reflect the compression of wealth at the top. When it launched, it covered the top 1,000 wealthiest people in Britain. It now covers just 350, with entry requiring wealth of at least £350 million. The people who would have occupied the bottom half of the original list are no longer wealthy enough to make it.
What ‘ghost GDP’ means
Priya Sahni-Nicholas, the co-executive director of the Equality Trust, introduced the “ghost GDP” framing to describe what the numbers represent for ordinary people.
“Every year politicians point to GDP growth as proof the economy is working. Ghost GDP shows us what that ambition has done to the rest of us because for most of us, it doesn’t feel like the economy is working at all,” she said. “Ghost GDP and the hollowed out economy it creates tells you what the rest of us have lost as a direct result.”
The concept describes a specific and measurable disconnection: when GDP grows but the growth goes predominantly to a tiny number of people at the very top, the headline figure becomes a ghost – present in the data, absent in the experience. The economy appears to be expanding while most of the population feels no improvement.
Gabriel Zucman, economist at the University of California Berkeley and the Paris School of Economics, confirmed this pattern extends well beyond Britain: “In the postwar decades, GDP growth numbers were broadly indicative of how income was growing for most of the population. Today, there is a total disconnect between macroeconomic indicators and the reality of income gains for most people.” He added that “the upsurge of income and wealth among the super-rich – and the accounting manipulations of multinational companies in Ireland – are distorting macroeconomic numbers.”
The specific shape of British billionaire wealth
The composition of billionaire wealth has changed significantly since 1990. Three billionaires in the original list were primarily linked to property, inheritance and finance. Today, finance accounts for approximately 30% of all billionaire wealth.
Sahni-Nicholas described this as “rentier capitalism: sitting on appreciating assets, collecting rents, charging fees for moving money around” – and characterised it as extracting value from the economy rather than creating it. This is an important distinction. The wealth that built Britain’s postwar billionaires came substantially from manufacturing, retail and services – businesses that employed people, produced goods and generated economic activity that distributed at least some of the gains more broadly. Contemporary billionaire wealth is increasingly generated through financial instruments, property appreciation and platform monopolies that employ relatively few people and distribute gains very narrowly.
Simon Pittaway, senior economist at the Resolution Foundation, noted that absolute wealth gaps have widened dramatically even where proportional inequality measures have remained stable: “Today, if someone with typical levels of wealth miraculously saved all of their earnings throughout their entire working life, it would no longer be enough to move them up to the top of Britain’s wealth ladder.”
What the data says about outcomes
The Equality Trust’s analysis connects billionaire wealth concentration to specific measurable outcomes for ordinary people.
Workers have endured the longest pay squeeze in living memory – real wages were lower in 2025 than at multiple points in the previous decade. The richest 50 families now hold more wealth than the poorest 34 million Britons combined.
Last month, the Health Foundation found that healthy life expectancy in Britain had fallen by two years over the past decade to under 61 years. This places the UK – the sixth-largest economy in the world – second to last among comparable wealthy nations on years lived in good health.
This week, Unicef ranked Britain 24th for child wellbeing among wealthy countries, 28th for mental wellbeing, 35th for income inequality and 25th for child poverty. These are not the rankings of a country whose GDP growth figures suggest it should be producing.
The political connection
The ghost GDP analysis arrives at a moment when the political conversation about who the economy serves has rarely been more central. As we reported in our piece on the Danny Kruger Question Time moment, a Question Time audience member won a round of applause for calling Reform UK “a party of billionaires.” As we reported in our analysis of Reform’s first year in local government, the party that claims to represent working people has raised council tax in every council it controls while its leader received an undisclosed £5 million personal gift from a Thailand-based crypto billionaire.
The ghost GDP framework provides the structural economic context for that political argument. The reason working people are experiencing economic stagnation while GDP numbers suggest growth is not a perception problem or a communications failure – it is a distributional reality. Economic growth is happening. It is going to 157 people.
Burnham’s leadership pitch – explicitly focused on “making the economy work for working people” – is a direct response to this data. Rayner’s programme of rent controls, public ownership and Fair Pay Agreements is a set of policy tools designed to interrupt the rentier capitalism pattern the Equality Trust identifies. Whether either can deliver depends on political authority they do not yet have.
What the ghost GDP analysis makes clear is that the argument for addressing wealth concentration is not ideological – it is empirical. The data is in. The outcome of 35 years of allowing wealth to concentrate at the top is: shorter healthy lives, worse child wellbeing, a pay squeeze without end and the fourth-worst income inequality ranking among comparable wealthy nations. The ghost was always going to catch up eventually.
