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...

Equivalization of incomes for household composition is accepted practice when measuring poverty but other variations in needs are rarely acknowledged. This paper uses data from two U.K. household surveys to quantify the extra costs of living associated with disability. The extra costs of...