Sir John Hills obituary

Some of the UK’s most intractable social challenges, from poverty and inequality to pension provision for an ageing population, were tackled by the academic Sir John Hills, who has died of cancer aged 66. Not only did he produce analysis of complex issues in language and data accessible to all, but his interventions prompted policy decisions that improved the lives of millions.

In the 1990s Hills oversaw an influential research programme into income and wealth distribution for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, putting equality on the agenda for the 1997 election, which ushered in a reforming Labour government.

In 2005 he was one of three members of the Turner commission, which set out plans for pension reforms, subsequently largely enacted and admired both for the consensual process by which they were arrived at and for their artful trade-offs – encouraging higher saving through auto-enrolment into pension schemes while gradually raising the threshold age for an improved state pension.

In 2012 he chaired a government review into fuel poverty that led to the adoption of an official strategy to tackle it. And in late 2014, he produced a defence of the welfare state, Good Times, Bad Times: The Welfare Myth of Them and Us, which dealt a blow to the easy stereotypes of “strivers” and “skivers” and did much to keep all the main parties committed to its principles in the election campaign the following year.

Demonstrating his genius for popularising complex issues, Hills took two fictional families who had featured in an ITV World in Action documentary cum mock game show in 1989 – the middle-class Osbornes and the low-income Ackroyds – and speculated how they would have fared in the intervening period.

Taking account of education, healthcare and pensions, as well as social security benefits, he demonstrated that over the full life cycle almost everyone got out of the welfare state what they paid in through taxes. Contrary to prejudice that the middle classes were systematically cross-subsidising others, only the poorest 10th of the population benefited more. The Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee observed, as campaigning for the 2015 election was getting under way, that the analysis “grabs the myths, the untruths that are being spun, by the throat in an unanswerable way”.

Hills had held positions at the London School of Economics since 1986 and was steeped in its rich Fabian traditions established by Richard Titmuss. He was appointed the Richard Titmuss professor of social policy in 2015. In a lecture in 2019, marking the 60th anniversary of Titmuss’s angry denunciation of the UK as an “irresponsible society” for its abuse of the opportunities he believed the welfare state had created a decade previously, Hills re-examined his predecessor’s verdict in a contemporary context and came to a not dissimilar verdict.

Whereas Titmuss had focused on factors such as the distorting effect of powerful financial institutions and what he saw as a narrow focus on education as an economic investment, Hills itemised Brexit, the climate crisis, growing holes in the benefits safety net, intergenerational unfairness and widening inequality. Acknowledging that much was better than it had been in 1959, he nonetheless concluded that when it came to irresponsibility, “the case is probably against us”.

John was born in Luton, the third of four children of Derrick Hills, an RAF meteorologist, and his wife, Valerie (nee Gribble), whom he had met during the second world war when she served in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. She later trained as a social worker and specialised in adoption. The family followed Derrick’s postings, including spells in the Netherlands and on Gan in the Indian Ocean, and John’s secondary education was divided between Nottingham and Abingdon, Oxfordshire, before he went to St John’s College, Cambridge, to study mathematics and economics and, among other things, edit the student newspaper Stop Press.

As a child, he had developed a fascination with cricket, becoming an expert scorer when it became apparent that his poor eyesight would inhibit any playing ambitions.

From Cambridge, Hills embarked on the first of two short stints in Africa, working first for the finance ministry in Botswana and subsequently for a commission on taxation in Zimbabwe. In Botswana, he met friends of Anne Power, then a British civil servant specialising in housing and urban communities but later a prominent LSE figure in her own right, and they put him in touch with her when he returned to Britain. Their friendship developed and they married in 1989.

Hills’s two African appointments sandwiched a master’s degree at Birmingham University and brief but key spells at the environment department in Whitehall, as a House of Commons researcher and at the Institute for Fiscal Studies – experiences that shaped his style and manner, already innately courteous and charming, so that he was to be trusted by politicians of all stripes.

Although he did advise the Labour leader John Smith and the shadow chancellor Gordon Brown in opposition, he never followed several other LSE social policy specialists in becoming a paid adviser to Labour in government. While Labour appointed him in 2006 to review social housing and in 2008 to chair a national equality panel, assessing variation in people’s economic outcomes, it was the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition administration that commissioned him to lead the fuel poverty review.

At LSE, Hills first joined its welfare state research programme, but established the renowned Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion (Case) in 1997, serving as its director until 2016. Seeing the need for a separate and distinctly global centre, he led negotiations to set up in 2015 the International Inequalities Institute, to work across LSE, helping secure a £64m grant for the project from the Atlantic Philanthropies. He served as co-director of the institute until he stepped down in 2018.

Hills, who was appointed CBE in 1998 and knighted in 2013, maintained his research interests in poverty and inequality until he was taken seriously ill during the summer. One of his last publications was a book he co-edited on poverty trends across the EU.

He and Anne, who is emeritus professor of social policy at LSE and head of the housing and communities research group based within Case, lived in Highbury, north London, but spent as much time as they could at their Lakeland cottage in Glenridding on Ullswater, from where Hills would indulge his passion for fell walking. He owned no car and travelled by train, often eschewing lecture opportunities overseas if they involved air travel.

Anne survives him, as do his stepdaughters, Carmen, Miriam and Lucy, and grandchildren, Jasmine, Sophie, Lucia, Bella and Isla-Rose.