The John Lewis department store chain is a barometer for middle-aged, middle-class Britain, embodying every obsession and unstated cultural value of the tribe. It’s not swish, not avant-garde, not fashionable, and not bothered at being scorned by Boris Johnson’s wife Carrie. When the retailer makes a loss, as it announced a couple of days ago, something shudders deep within the bourgeois soul.
The red ink is partly down to a conscious choice to invest for the long term, and partly down to Labour having made it much more costly to employ people. But there is no getting away from the fact shoppers are more reluctant to spend on big-ticket purchases such as a new sofa.
Considering habitués of John Lewis used to be well insulated against most economic malaise, this is disquieting in a wider sense than just for the store group itself. Many professional mid-lifers are facing a confluence of financial pressures. Someone aged 40 to 60 is quite likely to be exposed to a mortgage, increases in food and energy bills, and higher transport costs on top of school and university fees.
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Frozen income tax thresholds mean their spending power is being eaten alive by fiscal drag. Now that traditional defined benefit pensions have largely disappeared from the private sector, they need to save large amounts for retirement, via stock market-linked schemes that can go down as well as up.
Add to that the threat of redundancy and the solidity once associated with being middle-aged and middle class looks a lot wobblier. This is not to suggest middle Britain has been driven to the brink of poverty, but that its financial position may be more fragile than its income or apparent affluence suggest.
Compared with their own parents, today’s mid-lifers are more likely to have mortgages that are larger for longer. According to the Bank of England, nearly 750,000 households on rates below 3 per cent will come off those fixes in 2026, sending payments up by an average of just over £2,000 a year.
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Fiscal drag, which will last until 2030–31 at least, could have been custom-designed to hurt the middle classes. The higher-rate threshold, at which people begin to pay 40 per cent, has been frozen since 2022: by 2030–31, nearly a quarter of all taxpayers will be on this rate or the additional 45 per cent tier.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation pegs its Minimum Income Standard for a couple with two young children at £77,400 in gross household earnings in its most recent calculations. This is the level needed to achieve what members of the public regard as a socially acceptable way of life, and it includes modest holidays, socialising, and occasional presents.
Over-50s face more of a struggle to get back into work if they lose their job and, if they do, they earn 17 per cent less on average than they did before, according to Resolution Foundation research. A generation ago, the core John Lewis customer would have been the epitome of the comfortably-off. They are still not poor, but many are much less secure.
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