The Archbishop of Canterbury criticised the high salaries enjoyed by City high-flyers and called yesterday for more to be done in schools to teach young people how to manage their personal finances.

Dr Rowan Williams called for action to tackle excessive debt, which he said was harming many of Britain’s young people. He said that the disproportionate gap between rich and poor was causing envy and cynicism and that government ministers should be “a little more worried” about the high salaries of City high-flyers.

The Archbishop was speaking just days after Forbes magazine, the bible for the rich, published its list of Wall Street’s 20 top earners showing John Paulson, a hedge fund manager, making $3.3 billion (£1.7 billion) last year by betting against the mortgage market. George Soros, the investor who profited during the exchange-rate mechanism crisis by betting against sterling, came next with $2.4 billion.

Dr Williams and other bishops around the world are becoming increasingly concerned at the growing gap between rich and poor as the credit crunch bites, causing difficulties for the poor but leaving many in the world’s financial centres still enjoying large bonuses and barely affected by the economic downturn.

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Dr Williams, opening a debate in the House of Lords, called for urgent action to improve financial education and to regulate loan sharks, so that young people would not find themselves trapped in growing debt.

Earlier, he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: “I think we have seen in the last ten years or so the development of a culture where debt is so normal for young people — and student loans have rather intensified that — that there is a more urgent need than ever for some teaching about financial literacy in schools and further education institutions.

The Archbishop said: “One of the things that I really want to see as a matter of urgency reviewed here is both the interest rates imposed by some of the doorstep lending companies and the advertising standards.”

He added: “I think the more you have a disproportion between what people are earning and what they appear to be worth, the more we have astronomical sums with no clear rationale behind them, the less credibility the whole thing has.”

Dr Williams said: “There is a degree of envy and cynicism spread by disproportion and that leads people to feel even more alienated from the rest of society. The gulf is even greater between people who can’t manage their own affairs and take control of their own circumstances and those others.

“There may be an element of ‘I would like some of that’ but there is also an element of ‘What kind of society is this? How can I trust the system when it rewards some people so disproportionately in a way that doesn’t connect with where I am?’

“I don’t want to go into the details of how the regulation of high salaries might be achieved, because my primary concern today is the poorest end of the spectrum where I think more can be done,” he said.

Asked whether he was arguing that it was “easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven”, he replied: “I think it was said on quite good authority.”

The Archbishop went on to open a House of Lords debate on families and debt and said that there was an “urgent case” for better financial education in schools. This was needed to help to tackle family debt and a “particularly toxic version of the poverty trap” that afflicted children born into poverty. The Church of England’s stewardship officer, John Preston, supported the position. He said: “With more people in debt in their early twenties than ever before, it is vital that we build young people’s money skills.”