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...

This paper uses data from the British Household Panel Survey and the Attitudes to Inheritances Survey to estimate the magnitude of and the factors that are correlated with private inter-household transfers from parents to their adult children in the UK. Our evidence suggests that inter vivos...

In this paper we examine how the distribution of wealth has been changing in UK over the period 1995 to 2005 and how the sum of inheritance received between 1996-2004 contributed to the observed trends in wealth accumulation and wealth inequality. Using data from the British Household Panel...

In this paper we document the evolution of the annual flow of inheritances in the UK during the period 1984-2005 and provide estimates for the overall magnitude and the distribution of inherited wealth. Our results indicate that the period under examination the annual flow of inheritance...

The analysis in this paper focuses on the impact of health on the savings and consumption decisions of the elderly. In principle, there are at least five alternative channels through which health may affect consumption and savings. Ill health may affect both consumption capacities and needs...

Since April 2002 Jobcentre Plus has started to operate nationwide in the UK providing fully integrated benefit claiming and work placement/job-seeking activities for people of working age. This new organisation put an explicit work-focus in the delivery of the benefit system. Along with...