National Equality Panel
The independent National Equality Panel was
set up in October 2008, 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.
The panel’s 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 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 the main report, the panel presents
information on the distributions of these outcomes for the
population as a whole. Where possible it is indicated how they have
changed in the last decade or more, and how the UK compares with
other industrialised countries. But the main focus of the report is
on the position of different social groups within the distributions
of each outcome. The report shows 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, the
implications of our findings for the development of policy are set
out.
In the summary the panel highlights and
illustrates some of our key findings and suggests 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:
The chair of the Panel is
Professor John Hills, director of the Centre for Analysis of Social
Exclusion at the London School of
Economics.