National Equality Panel
The independent National Equality Panel was set up in October
2008 at the invitation of the Rt. Hon. Harriet Harman MP, Minister
for Women and Equality. The Panel was asked to investigate the
relationships between the distributions of various kinds of
economic outcome on the one hand and people's characteristics and
circumstances on the other. Our report addresses questions such as
how far up or down do people from different backgrounds typically
come in the distributions of earnings, income or wealth?
Specifically, the outcomes we examined are:
- educational outcomes, including the range of achievement of
young people at 16 and the highest educational qualifications of
adults;
- employment status of the adult population;
- earnings of those in paid employment, both hourly wages and
weekly earnings;
- individual incomes, received by each adult in his or her own
right from all sources, both before and after deducting direct
taxes;
- incomes calculated from the total receipts of the household of
which someone is a member, adjusted for the size of the household
and after allowing for benefits and direct taxes - known as
'equivalent net income';
- wealth - the stock of assets of households taking the form of
financial or housing assets, including private pension rights.
In our main report, we present information on the distributions
of these outcomes for the population as a whole. Where possible we
indicate how they have changed in the last decade or more, and how
the UK compares with other industrialised countries. But our main
focus is on the position of different social groups within the
distributions of each outcome. We show breakdowns relating to
gender, age, ethnicity, religion or belief, disability status,
sexual orientation, socio-economic class, housing tenure, nation or
region, and level of deprivation in the neighbourhood. The report
also examines how outcomes have changed over time and how they
develop across the life cycle. At the end of the report, we set out
the implications of our findings for the development of policy.
In the summary we highlight and illustrate some of our key
findings and suggest the challenges they pose for the development
of policy. The 6-page Executive Summary gives a short version of
the report’s main findings.
The full report, summary and executive summary are
available to download here:
The chair of the Panel is Professor John
Hills, director of the Centre for Analysis of Social
Exclusion at the London School of Economics. Please
click here to view our panel
members.