In October 2007, a unified Commission on Equality and Human Rights (CEHR) will begin operation in Britain. The Commission will have responsibility for monitoring and promoting human rights and equality on the grounds of gender, ethnicity, disability, age, sexual orientation, transgender status,...

The Equalities Review is an independent panel set up by the UK government in 2005 to investigate the persistence of social inequalities and to make recommendations for the development of a unified Commission for Equality and Human Rights. This paper was originally written for the Review. It...

Equivalisation of incomes for household size and composition is accepted practice when measuring poverty and inequality; adjustments to take account of other variations in needs are rarely made. This paper explores the financial implications of one possible source of additional needs:...

Government policies on disability - and criticism of them - rest in part on an understanding of the circumstances of disabled people informed by cross-sectional survey data, dividing the population into 'the disabled' and 'the non-disabled'. While conceptual debates about the nature of...

This paper attempts to clarify the significance of reforms to disability benefits proposed by the New Labour government in 1998, by setting them in the context of the development of disability benefits in the early 1970s. The first two sections chart the creation, extension and subsequent...

We examine the relationship between common sources of airborne pollution and population mortality in present day England. The current air quality limit values are low by both historical and international standards, and these are set at levels which are believed not to be harmful to health. We...

In this paper we explore the association between family income and children's cognitive ability (IQ and school performance), socio-emotional outcomes (self esteem, locus of control and behavioural problems) and physical health (risk of obesity). We develop a decomposition technique that allows...

This paper examines whether and how socio-economic status is associated with children's behavioural development in today's children. Using a large cohort of English children born in the early 1990s we find significant social inequalities in several dimensions of child behaviour at age 7. We...

Asthma is the most common chronic disease of childhood. Recent evidence has shown a socio-economic gradient in its distribution. This paper examines whether a number of factors argued to have led to a rise in the incidence of asthma might also explain the social gradient. Several of these have...

There is emerging evidence to suggest that initial differentials between the health of poor and more affluent children in the UK do not widen over early childhood. One reason may be that through the universal public funded health care system all children have access to equally effective primary...