Reflections on the development of health inequalities policy in England

Abstracts are written to summarise documents and to whet the reader’s interest. Alas, many readers just use them as a substitute for reading the whole paper, which given the brevity of abstracts can give a somewhat distorted impression. I hope that having read this abstract, you will read on. If you do, you will find that I offer a little personal history and a little impersonal history on the development of interest in the issue of health inequalities in England. I then summarise the policy response of recent Labour administrations, briefly detail the effects of this response, and finally offer my own three-pronged policy attack on our thus far really quite stubborn inequalities in health.