Big pay rises for top earners in London have masked cuts in rest of UK, says IFS

Britain's earnings gap is growing as business services, finance and IT workers prosper, thinktank finds

Big pay increases for highly paid workers in London and the south-east have masked real wage cuts across large swathes of the economy and led to a widening in the UK's geographical earnings gap, a leading thinktank has said.

A study from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) found that while workers in some sectors - such as manufacturing, education and hospitality - had fallen in inflation-adjusted terms, there had been significant rises for those employed in the business services sector, the City and IT.