To critically examine the medicalisation of public health and its implications for addressing upstream social, environmental, and structural determina…

Internal government forecasts obtained by the Guardian reveal ‘truly shocking’ effects of planned cuts

Air pollution poses a global concern due to its detrimental effects on climate, healthcare, and human capital accumulation. However, there is limited …

For years we have cut back, and back again. My benefits will now be frozen, but there’s nothing left to sacrifice, says Brian, a Changing Realities participant

Mental health has worsened since the pandemic. This is consistent with rising disability benefit claims for mental health.

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: disability. Using two UK household surveys, we seek to establish whether there are extra costs of living associated with disability, and to quantify them using the ¿standard of living¿ approach. The underlying theory is that a household¿s standard of living is a function of income and needs. The extra costs of disability can be derived by comparing the standard of living of households with and without disabled members at a given income, having controlled for other sources of variation. Results show that the extra costs of disability are substantial, especially for disabled people living alone, and that these costs rise with severity of disability. To bring out the policy implications of these results, we compare and contrast three different income distributions which differ in their adjustment for the extra costs of disability, for the population as a whole and for various subgroups. We find that unadjusted incomes significantly understate the problem of low income amongst disabled people, and thereby in the population as a whole.

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The UK coal industry was an important part of the economy, but it experienced substantial job losses during the 1980s and 1990s. To alleviate the resulting socio-economic problems, many areas recei...

Deindustrialisation and health in the UK and beyond