The gap in health between rich and poor in Britain and around the world is “unfair, unjust and avoidable”, a World Health Organisation report said Thursday, pointing a spotlight on the government’s dismal record on inequality.

Blaming a “toxic combination of bad policies, economics and politics”, the WHO’s commission on the social determinants of health said injustice was “killing people on a grand scale”. Reducing health inequities was “an ethical imperative”, it said.