Faith in Britain

7. Women earn only two-thirds of men's pay - average hourly pay for women manual workers was £3 to £11 in 1988; £4 to £46 for men.

8. The lowest paid workers are Asian women: the latest available figure (1982) gave them an income of £73 a week compared with £77 to £80 for white women; £109 to £120 for Afro-Caribbean men and £129 for white men.

9. Married mothers returning to work after bringing up two children find that either through lost earnings or reduced salary they have forfeited £135,000 over their working life.

10. Unclaimed benefits of poorer people unaware of their entitlements run to an estimated £1 billion per year.

11. In an average year, over 70,000 homes have their electricity cut off; over 20,000 lose their gas supplies; 7000 have their water turned off; and 14,000 homes are repossessed.

12. Income Support for a couple with two children under eleven is only 37 per cent of average earnings - a fall since 1978, when supplementary benefit was worth over half of earnings.

13. The tax burden falls more heavily on the poor than on the rich, who have gained from tax cuts. Of the £20 billion of tax cuts in the past decade a quarter have gone to the richest 1 per cent; only 17 per cent to the poorest 5 per cent.

14. In one budget alone (Nigel Lawson's Budget of 1988) the richest 1 per cent received fifteen times more in tax cuts than the poorest 12 per cent of taxpayers.

15. The gap between poor and better off widened further as a result of the poll tax: families with £100 to £150 weekly income pay four times more out of their income in this tax than households on £500 plus per week.

16. More people in work are now low paid (about 9 million) - i.e. on less than twothirds average earnings.

17. Pay for top executives doubled during the 1980s; over 1400 company directors have salaries of at least £100,000 a year (£2,000 a week).

18. Although two families in every three now own their own home, homelessness is also on the increase, doubling in the last decade.

19. 30,000 homeless families sleep in hostels each night, while 70,480 households in 1989 were in mortgage arrears by six months or more.