Because we‘re worth it

Because we‘re worth it Sunday Times Magazine
The baby-boomers‘ culture of hedonistic consumerism has left their offspring
with the crumbs from their table. And 65% of them say their children‘s lives
will be worse than their own. But are they bothered, asks Bryan Appleyard
Elisabeth a 51-year-old financial analyst has banned her four children from
using the sentence "I‘ll put it on my CV." A child of the 1960s, a baby boomer,
her youth was one of freedom and fun. Now she watches in dismay as her children
fret anxiously about their futures.
"My generation," says Sally, her 20-year-old student daughter, "is faced with
a huge amount of pressure to plan a career early on in life. Many of my friends
at university are simply getting a degree as a stepping stone to work in the
City."
Sally asked her mother what she should do for her summer holidays that would
look good on her CV. "I flipped," says Elisabeth. The brightly coloured 1960s
of her youth had given way to the grim noughties of her children‘s.
Elisabeth is not alone. The boomer generation is suddenly waking up to the
terrible truth that their legacy to their children is a nastier, tougher and
more anxious world than the one they knew. And the young are waking up to the
fact that it has happened thanks to the unthinking greed of their parents.
Battle lines are visible in the sand; an inter-generational war is brewing.
"When I speak to my parents," says Daniel, Elisabeth‘s 21-year-old son, a PhD
student, "I hear stories of how they campaigned against war, government, for
freedom of speech, etc. No one my age seems to believe that what they do will
have any impact on how the world is run."
Money offers them no hope of salvation. Pensions can‘t be trusted and property
prices have put houses beyond the reach of the young.
"I was lucky," says Maureen Ellis, a 55-year-old mother of three and a manager
at a transport consultancy, "because I worked in a merchant bank and was able
to buy a two-bedroom house in South Wimbledon. That house today would cost
Pounds 350-400K if one of my children wanted to buy that house they would need
to be earning Pounds 80-100K. Even a one-bedroom flat is way beyond their
means."
As a result, their children live at home. And pay rent. "I‘m paying off
someone else‘s mortgage when I could be saving for my own," says Holly, their
26-year-old daughter.
The Ellises (Maureen‘s husband, John, 57, is a joiner) were mis-sold pensions
in the 1980s, but, like many of their contemporaries, have come to think of
their home as their pension fund, a safety net denied to their children. "We‘ve
always regarded our house as our pension," says Maureen, "which means the
booming housing market is great for us but not for the children. We‘ve already
decided we will have to help them out when they‘re nearer to being in a
position to buy somewhere. As we don‘t have lots of savings, we‘ll need to take
equity from the house. We‘re very lucky that even when things got really bad
financially when the children were small, we managed to pay the mortgage. I
know people who had to sell their houses to pay off debts."
"I haven‘t even thought about a pension yet," says Patrick, her 25-year-old
son who has gone into his father‘s business. "I need to get somewhere to live
first."
The ageing boomers fear even more for their children as their own mortality
looms. Maureen has contracted diabetes. "It‘s funny getting to middle age and
losing what you‘d never valued previously. I was hardly ever ill, and overnight
I became this sick person. I try not to let it get me down as I don‘t want to
be defined by my poor health, but I often get very tired and worried about how
things will work out for them all."
Her husband, John, blames his own generation for utterly failing to equip
their children. "It‘s always those who‘ve had a privilege that wish, in their
twisted sense of egalitarianism, to seek to deny others, and this is
particularly relevant to post-baby-boomer education for the majority. I feel
our generation benefited from an education system that was the envy of the
world and which taught us the "tools of the trade" for life. Peace, love and
happiness, equality for all, rich/poor, male/female liberalism of the post
1960s baby boomers, has robbed our children‘s generation of an education that
would have equipped them to stand on their own two feet."
But for the youngest Ellis child, Jack, 19, higher education is desirable
primarily as a way on to the property ladder. "If I go to university, I‘ll take
a great life experience away with me and a chance of getting a better job, in
turn allowing me to save for a house a lot quicker and easier." These thoughts,
these anxieties, these dramas, these obsessions are being played out across
Britain and the developed world. Dinner-party conversations may start with the
banality of the "property ladder", but soon spread to wider issues of guilt and
responsibility. The baby boom the generational bulge that followed the second
world war created demographic cohorts that were very different from, even
remote from, their predecessors.
"We were all so much more detached from our parents," says Maureen."Our
parents in general," says John, "did not help with homework or take much
interest in our education as they generally believed the schools were doing a
good job, or they themselves hadn‘t been educated to the same standard we were."
The boomers are not detached. They fret and fuss over their ambitions for
their children, as if unaware that they are simultaneously bleeding them dry.
The big, destructive points about boomers are that there are too many of them
and they simply haven‘t the good manners to die. The rise in birth rates that
ran from the late 1940s to the early 60s, was followed by an equally sharp fall
as boomers either put off having children or had fewer. This means that our
demographics have become an upturned pyramid with ageing boomers squatting on
top of the much sparser population of their children. Meanwhile, the boomer
death shortage is becoming critical. The massive increase in longevity in the
20th century was expected to level off in the 1970s, but it didn‘t. Life
expectancies have continued to rise. It means the boomer bulge will continue
well into the future with elderly boomers continuing to exert political power
over the young.
They‘re good at this. As the West boomed in the 1950s and 60s and government
created vast programmes of state welfare and free education, boomers enjoyed
spectacular pensions, free university places and ever more generous health
provisions. Rising property prices underpinned the very characteristic boomer
sense that the future would look after itself. Their parents, who had seen
depression, war, austerity and endless sacrifice, murmured a few protests. But,
in their hearts, they shrugged. The happy, timeless present of their children
was exactly what they had fought, suffered and died for.
But now all the boomer chickens have come home to roost. The house-price
explosion that kept their dreams afloat has inflicted a double burden on their
children. First, they can‘t get on the housing ladder and, second, it has left
them with a dangerously unbalanced economy. A report from the National
Institute of Economic and Social Research (NESR) suggests that the boomers‘
boom means that the real national debt is, in fact, 130% of GDP, not the 40%
claimed by Gordon Brown. And Martin Weale of the NIESR also estimates that the
boom amounts to a transfer of assets from the young to the old of Pounds 1.3
trillion since 1987. Weale writes: "Working through the chain, the capital
gains of the house-owners are transfers from first-time buyers. The political
appeal of this situation is easy to grasp. The burden of rising house prices
falls on current and future first-time buyers."
Understanding this is crucial, because it casts serious doubt on the common
boomer habit of using their homes as their pension fund. If they simply held on
to their houses and passed them on to their children, its cash value would be
much less important. What would matter is they had passed on a place to live.
But, if they consume the value of the house in the form of a pension, then they
deny their children both the cash value hence the staggeringly high figure of
Pounds 1.3 trillion and the home, thus burdening them with the need to get on
the housing ladder as quickly as possible. Boomers are thus leaving their
children in a society catastrophically in thrall to the idiot God of property
values. No less than 21% of the average household‘s income goes on mortgages;
in 1996 it was 11%.
Pensions, meanwhile, have collapsed. Boomers now retiring with their final
salary schemes intact will seem fabulously affluent to their children when they
retire. Workers will now retire on less than half their salary: on average they
will receive little more than the minimum wage. An under-40 "Generation X-er"
on the average wage of Pounds 447 a week can expect Pounds 223 in retirement.
Again, the full implications of this need to be understood. Lower pensions,
combined with lower savings in general, mean that boomer children are heading
for very impoverished retirements. This will produce intense political pressure
over the next few decades for government to intervene by raising state
pensions. So boomer irresponsibility is creating a huge liability for the next
generations.
Even welfare generosity has backfired. Higher education for the masses, for
example, now means tuition fees leading to debt a further barrier to getting
into the homeowner club.
"Everyone has a bloody degree," says Daniel. "To differentiate yourself and
get a job requires further education, which costs time and money, with the
outcome that you ironically end up working for some lucky git who went into
work straight after university and is less qualified than you but has more work
experience."
Boomer children are anxious and trapped in a future that stubbornly declines
to look after itself. At the personal level, there are all the problems defined
by Elisabeth and Maureen and their families and, at the global level, there is
the threat of environmental disaster, the apparent restarting of the cold war
with Russia, the confrontation with terrorism and uncertainties about food,
fuel, water and the pressures of globalisation and mass migration. So now is
the time for the boomers to ask themselves a very awkward question: have they
wrecked the joint with their freedom and fun and left their impoverished,
anxious children to make what they can of the wasteland that remains?
Economists, sociologists, philosophers, environmentalists and politicians are
deep in debate about this. How we value the future, what we are prepared to
sacrifice for our children, is one of the most intriguing and urgent debates of
our time. But what are we prepared to do now?
"We have had a period of gradual incremental change following the shocks of
the world wars in the first half of the century," says Avner Offer, professor
of economic history at Oxford, "but now new shocks are in sight climate change,
ageing, energy depletion, globalisation, immigration, runaway technology and
maybe nuclear war. These cannot be dealt with by the means of changing prices,
which is the current economic orthodoxy. I think we know what to do but we
don‘t have the willpower to do it."
This is unlikely to remain a merely academic debate for long. At the global
level, the environment is raising questions about how much we are prepared to
sacrifice in the present to protect the future. At the personal level, young
people are protesting about the political power and greed of the boomers. In
Germany Dr Jorg Tremmel, 35, runs The Foundation for the Rights of Future
Generations (FRFG).
"Because of the labour market in Germany," he says, "the present young is
known as Generation Internship because they can‘t get paid jobs. In 1970 a 30
year-old was earning 15% less than a 50-year-old. Now the gap is 40%."
Precisely the same income gap between young and old has opened up in France
over the same period. Unemployment among the young has soared with a quarter of
all graduates without a job. In the recent presidential election campaigns,
both candidates were falling over themselves to soothe the anxieties of
increasingly disaffected youth Sarkozy with interest-free loans and training
allowance, Royal with more housing and guaranteed jobs. Meanwhile, savings
ratios among the French young have collapsed. A group Impulsion Concorde has
been founded to give young people a say in their future. One of their slogans,
significantly, is, "We will not pay your debt". As in Britain, young people are
forced to stay at home with their parents 45% of Italian 30-to 34-year olds are
still at home as property prices keep them out of the housing market and ageing
boomers fail to die and pass on their wealth.
The FRFG is campaigning to change the constitution of Germany to make it
mandatory to consider the rights of future generations. This was tried by
Chirac in France, but Tremmel says he just set up a committee of old
professors. In Israel there is a Commission for Future Generations designed to
take "a comprehensive view of the legislative picture with regard to any
potential negative effect on the needs and rights of future generations
together with the means to prevent such legislation from taking place". And, as
our own David Willetts, shadow secretary of state for education and skills, is
fond of pointing out, the Iroquois, an American-Indian tribe, has, as a part of
their Great Law, the idea of Seven Generation Sustainability. Every decision
has to be taken in the light of its effects on the next seven generations. At
the moment the FRFG is a small operation and Tremmel says there is not enough
activity elsewhere. But he is sure the idea will spread as the young realise
how much they have been expropriated by the old.
This, as Tremmel says, is a confrontation that is only just beginning. We are
used to class wars, but are facing an inter-generational battle. Realising
their predicament, the young will want to fight the expropriations of the old.
Avner Offer welcomes this. He sees it as a way in which the political market
can offset the baleful effects of the economic market. In the end, he points
out, the old can‘t go on stealing from the young for ever. "How can the old
seize everything? The young will rebel... They‘ll simply go on strike."
This will mean the boomers will have to be deprived of some home comforts.
There are any number of ways of doing this. Gordon Brown‘s 1997 raid on the
pension funds might just be the beginning. One obvious way would be a massive
liberalisation of the housing market by allowing new building on an
unprecedented scale. This would slay the idiot god by driving down house prices
and, of course, it would impoverish millions of boomers. Unsurprisingly, this
step is not being openly advocated by any party.
Our leading thinking politician in this area is "two brains" Willetts. He has
a lecture on the issue that, Al Gore-ishly, he takes around the country to
spread the news. He strongly believes we have to focus more on the need of
future generations, but thinks the sting can be taken out of this for the
boomers. "I‘m an optimist. I think we can rise to this challenge. What it
requires is a different way of thinking, of making policies that take account
of the future. The questions of whether we can appeal to anything above the
selfish gene. But I‘m not a reductionist; I do think there‘s more to life than
the selfish gene."
Willetts believes that government must take responsibility. "Government and
society is an inter-generational contract and one task of government is to
maintain that contract so that no one generation exploits the others."
He is pressing for incentives for long-term thinking to be included in the
next Conservative manifesto. "There are several things we are working on: a
regulatory regime for utilities that rewards and encourage investment, a
simpler, more attractive savings vehicle to make it easier for young people to
get started with saving."
As yet, no manifesto decisions have been made, perhaps because the problem is,
as Willets knows better than anybody, highly complex. The question of how
exactly we should value the future is one that evades all academic disciplines,
though the economists have tried very hard to give an answer, notably through
the strange idea of the social discount rate (SDR). If I offer you Pounds 100
now, you know exactly what it is worth. But what if I offered it to you in a
year‘s time? How would you value it? Probably at less than Pounds 100 because,
apart from anything else, you might die or the world might end. So your SDR
involves a reduction in value over time,‘ indeed, this is standard practice.
The UK Treasury applies an SDR of 7% your Pounds 100 is valued at Pounds 93 in
one year‘s time.
Infants tend to apply a staggeringly high SDR. Researchers offered children a
choice of one sweet now or two in the near future. A minority chose two in the
future, the rest applied an instant SDR of 100%. (Unsurprisingly, the prudent
ones were found to do better later in life.)
You might think it would be virtuous to value the future more highly than the
present, and thus apply a positive SDR, making your cash worth more in the
future. But beware. Lenin and Stalin applied a very high positive SDR by
valuing the present as nothing and the future as everything. Millions died
because they had no value.
This dusty aspect of economic theory became urgent with the publication of Sir
Nicholas Stern‘s report on climate change. Stern is one of the world‘s leading
economists and he applied a very low SDR of below 1%, calling for sacrifices
and long-term investments now to ensure the wellbeing of the next generations.
He ran into fierce criticism. "It was a ludicrously low figure," said one
economist, "that would mean present generations would impoverish themselves for
the future. He just did it to make the climate change figures look very big
indeed."
On the other hand, Stern may have just been offering a corrective to the
instinctive boomer view that the future could look after itself as economic
growth would ensure that successive generations would grow richer and their
wealth would outstrip our present concerns. After all, the SDR is arbitrary,
mine is as valid as Stern‘s. It can be anything we want it to be. If we are
selfish, it is high; if unselfish, low. For boomers it has seemed high because
they expect the economic growth they have enjoyed to continue for ever.
Americans, in particular, seem to take this view for granted. In their book
The Coming Generational Storm: What You Need to Know about America‘s Economic
Future, Laurence Kotlikoff and Scott Burns argue that current government
schemes notably Medicare, which provides health care for the elderly are based
on deluded economics and are liable to explode, placing a huge, almost
incalculable tax burden on future generations. The official debt figure of the
US is understated by trillions of dollars.
"The official debt is not really the measure of anything," says Kotlikoff.
"You have to look at something fundamental, which is the generational
imbalance... I realised we were flying blind, we had no idea what our true
generational policy was. We were looking at numbers that had no clothes you‘re
probably familiar with the emperor‘s new clothes story. In current economics
every single institution is looking at the wrong numbers routinely."
Kotlikoff also points to the key political force sustaining these delusions:
the brute boomer power of numbers. "I think certainly the elderly as a group,
when it comes to election day, have nothing to do but vote. You know they‘re
not working, so they‘re a group that gets a lot of attention from politicians
and are well organised because they have nothing to do but organise."
Our position is not quite as bad. Our hospitals aren‘t, on the whole, as good
as American ones, but the NHS does keep costs under control. Medicare, in
contrast, is an open cheque written by the boomers but drawn on their
children‘s account. Also our Treasury does do some inter-generational
accounting that discourages the writing of open cheques. Yet, politically, we
are dominated by the boomer bulge and, culturally, we share the American
fondness of living on credit: spend now so someone else will pay later.
At this point it becomes clear that economics can only describe the symptoms,
the disease itself is political and, ultimately, cultural. As Avner Offer
writes in his book The Challenge of Affluence, "Contracting for the future is
difficult, For example, consumer choice finds it difficult to cope with
providing support for everyone‘s old age. The time gap between consumer
decisions and their consequences is just too long. It is up to politicians to
craft durable commitments for intergenerational transfer."
But how do they do it? At one level, human beings are just bad at thinking
coherently about the future. The great philosopher David Hume said it all in
the 18th century: "There is no quality in human nature, which causes more fatal
errors in our conduct, than that which leads us to prefer whatever is present
to the distant and remote." But, at another level, it seems the boomers are
historically bad at planning for or making sacrifices on behalf of the future.
This raises the question: are they a uniquely selfish generation?
No, says Avner Offer, we cannot blame one generation, it is simply what has
happened. The welfarist assumptions of the immediate postwar period gave way to
market liberalisation and the cult of the individual. This, in turn, led to
what he calls a "retreat from commitment".
"...in embracing the tide of new rewards," he writes, "cognitive,
occupational, and material, men and women have had to choose, and they have
often chosen the shorter view. In particular, they appear to have given a lower
priority to the longest of horizons, that which transcends the individual, and
extends beyond him and into the future, by means of his or her children."
Individualistic boomers loosened the ties of family and future just because,
in essence, they could do so. The loosening was done with an excess of
enthusiasm amounting to self-indulgence and greed. Qualms were overcome by the
thought that, just as the boomers had been much richer than their parents, so
their children would be much richer than them.
This led to more dangerous developments than just credit-card debts and
stratospheric mortgages. It led to widespread short-termism. Investment payback
times are now calculated in a few years, so all projects are subject to instant
obsolescence. In the European context, Britain is very good at short-term
profits and very bad at long-term investment. In an American context, we are
very bad at incubating businesses. Our venture-capital groups are only
interested in buying existing business; in the US they pursue start ups. We are
also ridiculously indulgent to the insanely short-term ambitions of private
equity operators, complacently watching as they manoeuvre to overthrow
long-established companies. Government is little better. Gordon Brown‘s private
finance initiative scheme is a short-term way off keeping debt off the
government balance, but, one day, someone will have to pay.
At the heart of this short-termism is the deep cultural truth that boomers
have lost the old, philanthropic view of the future. Look at it this way: Sir
Joseph Bazalgette was a Victorian civil engineer who built the Thames
Embankment and London sewers which suppressed cholera. Both are still in use
today. Peter Bazalgette, his great-great-grandson, produces Big Brother. No new
London buildings nor, indeed, sewers are designed to last as long as anything
the Victorians built.
Can the boomers be persuaded to think their way out of their short-termist,
profligate ways? It would be nice to imagine they could. The problem is the
philosophers haven‘t got much further than pointing out that economic devices
like the SDR are meaningless. How can they explain the need for sacrifice?
"We have no theory of ethics involving future generations," says Stephen
Gardiner, a British philosopher working in the US. "And I don‘t like this
notion of sacrifice. If I‘m overspending on my credit card and someone tells me
to cut back, can I say that is sacrifice?"
The sad reality is that individual boomers are realising they are trapped by
the world they have made at the same time as they realise the extent of the
damage their generation has done.
"It‘s distressing," says Elisabeth, "you want to wave a wand and tell your
children it will be fine, that they will manage, but you know it‘s going to be
really, really tough."
"I think," says her daughter, Sally, "we live in a very narrow-minded and
decidedly selfish society. We ought to seek to succeed where our parents have
failed... but instead we have become cynical about it."
The final irony is that even as environmentalists the one unconditionally
virtuous role they have invented and passed on to their children the boomers
fail. One academic study called Greening the Greys observed that boomers have
the biggest carbon footprint of any demographc sectors: 13.5 tonnes a year, up
to 20% higher than anybody else.
The boomers have poisoned the wells and ploughed salt into the fields. Their
postwar idyll is over; the world is returning to its default mode of
confrontation and violence, now made more ominous by looming catastrophes like
global warming. In the midst of their success and greed, the boomers forgot
Edmund Burke‘s most imperishable insight: that society is a contract with three
interested parties: the dead, the living and the unborn. Their children are
paying the price of their amnesia. For the moment, they seem resigned, but,
soon enough, they‘ll want their world back
* House prices are at their least affordable for a generation. It costs nearly
seven times the yearly wage to afford a home and mortgages take 45 % of take
home pay. SOURCE FOR FACT BOX CAPITAL ECONOMICS.
* THE 50-to 64-year-olds have a higher carbon footprint than any other age
group and THEY ALSO spend the most on transport, holidays, food and heating
* First-time buyers spend more on mortgage interest than at any time since the
last recession. They pay an average of 18.3 of their gross income in interest
payments. SOURCE FOR FACTBOX, STOCKHOLM ENVIRONMENT INSTITUTE.
* Today‘s teens are the first to be less healthy than their parents; four
times more are obese than in the 1970s. Sexually transmitted infections have
almost trebled.
SOURCE FOR FACT BOX, BOTTOM: THE LANCET.
* PFI projects are building a huge future debt. In Scotland alone, the total
capital value of signed PFI contracts within the NHS is Pounds 602m and the
debt created is Pounds 2.4bn. SOURCE FOR FACT BOX, THE CENTRE FOR INTERNATIONAL
PUBLIC HEALTH POLICY.
* GENERATION GAP: QUIDS IN
SARAH COOK, 20, SEDGEFIELD, COUNTY DURHAM
‘My Mum had a tough childhood in comparison to mine. She was the eldest of
four and had to look after the others, but she passed her 11-plus, got to
grammar school and became a teacher. My Dad was a teacher too. After he was
offered a job lecturing at Durham University, my parents moved north to
Sedgefield. At that point, they didn‘t have much money but they managed to buy
their own house. House prices were low then because of the miners‘ strike. I
guess they got lucky at the right time. It wasn‘t easy for Mum and Dad bringing
the three of us up and paying off their mortgage at the same time. Things have
worked out, though. With their pensions, their house and the money they‘ve
saved over the years, I think Mum and Dad will enjoy their retirement when they
get round to it. When I decided I wanted to go to university, they were very
supportive, just as they‘d been for my brother and sister. I didn‘t qualify for
a grant but I do have a student loan. I am careful with what I get and make the
money last. Mum and Dad didn‘t want me to get a job so that I could focus on my
degree, so they help me out as much as they can, paying my rent and as well as
my tuition fees. I think I am quite lucky in comparison to friends at
university. When I think about the future, I worry about money but I think
things will be okay. Mum and Dad definitely won‘t be leaving me with any debt,
that‘s for sure.‘
* GENERATION GAP: QUIDS OUT
MATT GIBBINS, 21, LONDON.
‘I am very worried about money and I see myself leaving university with
student-loan debts of around Pounds 15,000. My parents have helped me a little
financially, but they like to enjoy life, rather than saving for my
inheritance. I‘m not complaining about it. It‘s what everyone does now. They
have bought a house in Spain, a villa with a swimming pool, which they are
going to use as their retirement home. They sold our four-bedroom family home
in Woking, and are living in a downsized two-bedroom flat. They love their
house in Spain and I don‘t begrudge them spending the money now, even though I
did expect more from them. I‘m an only child, too. I work in an office during
the day in the holidays, and in the evenings I work in a pub. I am permanently
worried about money, and even though I‘m earning a reasonable amount in the
holidays, I still need student loans to tide me over.
When I leave university I‘ll be on my own, and I can‘t imagine getting on the
property ladder around here -a little flat in Woking costs at least Pounds
200,000. It will be years before I can afford my own place. I do have friends
whose parents have paid for them to go through university and it can make me
feel envious, but my parents have their own life and I don‘t see why they
shouldn‘t enjoy themselves. It‘s just hard for me to set off in life with all
this debt round my neck like a millstone. I am very worried for my children in
the future, as going to university is becoming more expensive, coupled with the
cost of living.
People don‘t expect to save in the way that they used to, so there is going to
be a growing expectation that children have to fend for themselves.‘
* THE SORRY TALE OF ACACIA AVENUE
Who could afford to live at number 13?
1983 HOUSE COST Pounds 117,093
Male teacher with a wife working part time as a secretary, using 11% of income
as deposit
1992 HOUSE COST Pounds 130,962
Male head teacher, wife working part time, using 12.2% of income as deposit
1997 HOUSE COST Pounds 163,048
Consultant paediatrician, husband works as teacher, using 12.2% of income as
deposit
2006 HOUSE COST Pounds 400,000
City solicitor, buys for buy-to-let - three junior teachers rent as three
small flats, using 35.4% of income as deposit
ACACIA AVENUE: RESEARCH BY CHRIS COOK; FIGURES FROM THE COUNCIL OF MORTGAGE
LENDERS, THE DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNITIES AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT, THE ECONOMIC AND
SOCIAL DATA SERVICE, THE FAMILY RESOURCES SURVEY AND THE FAMILY EXPENDITURE
SURVEY. ALL PRICES ARE IN 2006-7 POUNDS.
Copyright (C) The Sunday Times, 2007