Professor Tim Callan:

I will be brief. I will skip the first two pages of my presentation and start on page 3. In terms of the broad picture of what is happening in income distribution, another perspective on this is to examine what has happened to average real incomes, corrected for prices, over the period 2008 to 2012. The figures in the presentation show that the lowest income group falls by over 25% while the average fall is 14%. There is also an above average fall for the second and the top income groups. We have done a rapid update of those numbers since 11 o'clock and they have changed slightly because the share of the bottom income group has risen slightly but it is still a fall of 20% for the bottom income group compared with that 14%. That is a useful perspective.