Report: Decline In Healthy Life Expectancy Across UK

Today, Guardian columnist Aditya Chakrabortty covered a momentous new report by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which notes a decline in healthy life expectancy (HLE) since 2011-2013. The figures show a particularly marked decrease in HLE – the amount of time one can expect good general health – since 2020.

Here are some of the key statistics:

Across the entire UK, male HLE has declined by 1.8 years and female HLE by 2.5 years since 2019-2021.
England has maintained the highest HLE among the four UK constituent countries, though all four have experienced declines.
In England, the South East enjoys the highest HLE by region, approximately six years higher than that of the North East, the lowest-scoring region; the ONS describes this as a “clear geographical divide”.

Graph of healthy life expectancy (HLE) by constituent UK nation. All four (England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales) have seen declines in HLE, particularly since 2020.

You may read the full ONS report here.

Chakrabortty points out the evident causal connections between the last decade and a half of Tory austerity, which has heightened income inequalities and painfully sharpened the challenges of poverty, and the losses laid bare by these data. That the decline in HLE grew steeper after COVID-19 hit is no amelioration of government guilt. On the contrary, this fact merely exposes the insidious nature of austerity’s harms: not a swift, immediate and obvious depletion such as would inevitably spark widespread rebellion, but a gradual removal of supports, barely remarked until entire structures collapse under their own weight.

This report underlines that systemic issues, growing poverty and corruption at the top have real and poignant consequences. By contrast, social democracy Sweden has seen rising HLE.

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