On Sunday, May 18, 2025, The Sunday Times published its 37th annual Rich List, detailing the UK’s 350 wealthiest individuals and families. The Hinduja family topped the list for the fourth consecutive year with £35.3 billion. The main focus of media coverage of the list was on the drop in the number of UK billionaires, which fell from 165 to 156, as well as the decrease of the combined wealth of those listed by 3% to £772.8 billion.
Although some commentators have attributed the fall to the change of government and more assertive efforts to tax the super-rich, fluctuations in global financial markets are likely to have been much more important. The fortunes documented on the rich list remain absolutely enormous and the slight decline from last year remains trifling, particularly given the sheer scale of the sums involved, the contast with the hardship experienced by households across the UK economy, the potential of taxes on the super-rich to address funding challenges facing vital UK public services and the dubious way in which many rich list entrants accumulated their wealth in the first place.
Key insights from the findings that we think are particularly important (and under-discussed) are as follows:
1) The 3% fall in the total wealth of rich list entrants since last year was widely reported, but over the longer term the wealth of the super-rich has exploded. Since 2008, rich list wealth has increased about 4 x faster than median UK household wealth. If household wealth had increased at the same rate, the typical household would be over £260,000 better off.
2) Again, coverage tends to focus on new entrants to the rich list or the rise and fall at the top, but one of the most striking things is how little it changes. 19 of the top 20 entrants were there last year. There are some genuine entrepreneurs on the list, but more who reflect how ‘money goes to money.’ Nine of the top 20 were effectively born on the rich list while three more were born into the businesses that got them there.
3) The value to wider society of entrants varies considerably. Only four of the top 20 appear in the corresponding list of Britain’s biggest taxpayers, and all contribute less than 1% of their net wealth in tax, (even allowing for the very generous definition of tax paid used to compile the tax list) which is the level at which some experts have suggested a wealth tax could be levied.
As we commented in the Guardian and Mirror‘s coverage of the Rich List, while this year’s list shows a small fall in the value of oligarch assets this year, over a longer period it illustrates how a tiny handful of very rich people have captured an increasing share of the country’s wealth. New research from the Equality Trust published the day after the Rich List came out is further evidence of this revealing that just 50 families possess more wealth than 50% of the UK’s population.
If the super-rich and the companies they own were taxed more effectively and paid the people that work for them a better wage, living standards in Britain would be much higher. Meanwhile the rich list entrants would still be extremely rich by any reasonable person’s definition and well rewarded for whatever success they have achieved. It’s naïve to pretend that taxing or limiting billionaire wealth would be easy, but equally such extreme concentration of income and wealth is very obviously not sensible or efficient and policymakers should surely be a lot more energetic in trying to do something about it.