Research has just been published which unfortunately shows a growing gap in the quality of health care in England between the poorest and richest areas.
New analysis has found that people living in the most deprived areas of England experience a worse quality of NHS care and poorer health outcomes than people living in the least deprived areas. These include spending longer in A&E and having a worse experience of making a GP appointment.
The research, undertaken by QualityWatch, a joint Nuffield Trust and Health Foundation programme, has looked at 23 measures of healthcare quality to see how these are affected by deprivation. In every single indicator looked at, care is worse for people experiencing the greatest deprivation.
Poverty as measured by material deprivation through lack of economic resources remains absolutely central to understanding the causation of most aspects of social exclusion and a range of social outcomes, concludes the 2nd of the two-volume PSE-UK study.
OUT NOW - the two-volume study based on the findings of the Poverty and Social Exclusion in the UK research. Volume 1 examines the extent of poverty and volume 2 the different dimensions of disadvantage. Published by Policy Press on November 29, 2017.
Read the Journal papers coming from the PSE research. The latest paper examines how analyses of the micro paradata ‘by-products’ from the 1967/1968 Poverty in the United Kingdom (PinUK) and 2012 Poverty and Social Exclusion in the UK (PSE) surveys highlight changes in the conditions of survey production over this 45 year period in the latest output from the PSE research.
The final report from the PSE qualitative research on the reality of life on low income records how people's perpetual struggles to make meagre budgets stretch eventually this takes its toll on their lives.
Between 2000 and 2013 the pay gap between the top 10 per cent and the bottom 10 per cent of earners rose by 5 per cent, according to a new analysis from the Trades Union Congress, released to mark the beginning of 'Fair Pay Fortnight'.
The government should have a minimum wage target of £6.94 an hour and create a powerful watchdog to help workers escape low pay, according to the conclusions of an inquiry chaired by Sir George Bain, one of the original architects of the UK statutory national minimum wage.
The inquiry's final report was published on the day the coalition government announced the minimum wage would rise by 19p – or 3 per cent – to £6.50 an hour and signalled there would be bigger increases in future years.
The Low Pay Commission has recommended a 3 per cent rise in the statutory minimum wage from 1 October 2014, lifting the main adult hourly rate from £6.31 to £6.50. Given the current inflation forecast of 2.3 per cent, this would represent a small real-terms increase – the first such increase for five years.
In a letter to the Business Secretary, Vince Cable, the Commission said the recommended rise would mean the number of jobs covered by the minimum wage would increase by over a third, to one and a quarter million.
The national minimum wage in the UK is no longer strong enough to tackle the country’s low pay problems, according to a report from the Resolution Foundation think tank.
The report presents the interim findings of a review headed by George Bain, who was originally responsible for overseeing the introduction of the minimum wage in 1998 under the previous Labour government.