English Research worldwide is establishing basic needs for personal health and well-being. Official acceptance of this consensual evidence into policy tends to be slow, partial and unsystematic, resulting in avoidable health deficits, waste of human potential and costs to society. Minimum personal costs of meeting these basic needs can be assessed, together with costs of the popular consensus on other requirements for healthy decent participatory living. UK policy could next aim to provide for these costs generally, including the social security and anti-poverty programmes that determine minimum living standards, and so life chances, of increasing millions of people.