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Overview

The Social and Environmental Determinants of Health Research Driver Programme works to understand how social and physical environments contribute to health inequalities in the UK.����

By creating linked resources to health data, it provides tools to inform policies and interventions aimed at reducing these inequalities.��

The programme focuses on factors like family structure, work patterns, income, housing conditions, and environmental exposures that can either worsen or improve health disparities. Through evidence-based approaches, it aims to address the root causes of these inequalities.��

‘We work with researchers, data providers and the public to develop and enhance new and existing health data resources through linkage to unique address identifiers, using methods to preserve privacy. This not only allows linkage of health data to environmental data at fine spatiotemporal scale, but also linking household members together within these datasets. This will revolutionise research into environmental and social determinants of health in the UK, to inform policies to reduce health inequalities and environmental injustice.”

 

Pia Hardelid, Professor of Epidemiology, UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health.�� Director of Social and Environmental Determinants of Health Research Driver Programme and UKRI and NIHR Net Zero Research Hub.��

 

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To achieve this, the programme has four main strategies:��

1. A systematic approach using pseudonymised national data to study population-level factors��
2. Create time-varying social and environmental datasets linked to Unique Property Reference Numbers ()��
3. Generate new UPRN-linked data assets linked to administrative databases����
4. Enhance longitudinal cohort study datasets with UPRN-linked data��

By targeting the underlying causes of health disparities, this initiative seeks to improve public health outcomes across the UK.��

Workstreams:

1. Infrastructure, data, methods and governance��
2. Health in aging populations��
3. Health and development from birth to adulthood��
4. Linkage to historic/consented cohorts

Activities:

• Development of governance principles for sharing privacy protected UPRNs across Trusted Research Environments (TREs) avoiding re-identification��
• Identifying standards for linking geospatial data to health and social-related records for re-use��
• Building and maintaining public trust and public support through involvement and engagement��
• Geo-coding and UPRN assignment of exemplar data assets����
• Modelling UPRN-level health-relevant time-resolved geospatial data����
• Investigating the influences of clustering of health, social factors and adversity��
• Investigating exposure to pollution in and around homes and schools and health from child to adulthood��
• Investigating the association between air pollution and sunlight exposure and cognitive and health outcomes throughout the life course����
• Investigating the associations between the indoor environment and housing and health in older adults in England.��
• Developing the Small Area health Statistics Unit (SAHSU) governance to widen access����

Key initiatives and infrastructure:

• (ECHILD)

Driving Progress in Poverty and Health Metrics

Health Data Research UK funds the Social and Environmental Determinants of Health Driver Program to advance poverty and health metrics

The project involves joint work with ONS to extend their existing admin-based statistics to develop an anonymised Annual Household Income subdivided into Quintiles (AHIQ). The AHIQ ��project has been awarded £300,000 in supplementary funding through the 51������ to work with the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Running from 2026 for 24 months, this partnership project will accelerate work to create a consistent national income indicator to better understand and address health inequalities.

Current measures of income often depend on surveys or area-level proxies, which, while valuable, can miss many families in poverty — the “unseen poor” — does not extend across the whole income distribution. AHIQ addresses this gap by securely and anonymously linking household income and benefits data, to create bands or quintiles of annual household income linked via encrypted Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN). This approach enables timely, fine-grained insights while maintaining the highest standards of privacy and security.

This project focuses on three key areas and uses exemplar analyses relevant to children:

• Assessing household income distribution and its relationship to inequalities in health for children and families.
• Validation: comparing AHIQ against self-reported income data in longitudinal population studies
• Public engagement: building transparency and trust by involving communities and policymakers in shaping how data is used.

AHIQ is closely aligned with the UK government’s missions on health inequality and levelling up, and comes at a critical time as the government and NHS sets out its 10-year plan for transformation. By delivering a secure, anonymised, and timely measure of household income — available through trusted research environments and the emerging national data library — the project will equip policymakers, local authorities, and health services with the evidence needed to plan and deliver support where it is most needed. Beyond health, the metric is intended as a wider public resource, supporting fairer decision-making across social policy and public service delivery.

SEDH Research Team: Joseph Lam (Project PI), Ruth Gilbert, Chris Dibben, Andy Boyd

ONS Team: Led by James Scruton

This work is supported in part by strategic theme.