In her monthly column on the condition of the working class, Terina Hine writes about the impact of austerity on life expectancy

Life expectancy is used to gauge the health of a population. For over a century, average life expectancy in England rose decade by decade. In 2011, that came to an end. Increases in life expectancy first slowed down then flatlined, and now the number of years you can expect to live is less than it was a decade ago.

In 2011, men were living to an average age of 79 and women to 83. Today, ONS figures show average life expectancy for men is 78.8 years and for women, 82.8 years. On the face of it, this fall may not sound so large, but when translated to lives lost, a different picture emerges.

A report submitted to parliament in 2023 suggested there had been 300,000 more deaths between 2012 and 2019 than had previously been predicted. Also, while life expectancy has stalled or fallen, the length of time spent in poor health has risen.

By 2018, improvements in life expectancy had slowed across the entire country and across all socio-economic groups and the time spent in poor health increased. On average, men spend 16.4 years in ill health and women 20.1 years.

These averages hide an even darker story. The discrepancies between rich and poor are stark and reveal an extremely divided society in which the rich live significantly longer and have healthier lives than the poor.

Income, education, housing, diet, access to health care and social exclusion all determine how long we live. People in deprived areas, living in poor housing and with lower than average educational attainment have considerably lower life expectancy than the wealthy. As these inequalities have risen since 2010, the divisions between rich and poor in health and life expectancy have grown. 

Unlike in the past, deaths are rarely caused by infectious diseases (with the exception of the pandemic), nor are high death rates concentrated in babies and the very young.

Instead, loss of life is the result of heart, respiratory diseases and cancer (especially lung cancer) later in life. Younger lives are also cut short by drug abuse and suicide. In the most deprived area of the country, Blackpool, doctors refer to this sickness as ‘shit-life syndrome’.

Differences in life expectancy between the most and least deprived were exacerbated during Covid and, by 2020-22, regional differences had significantly widened. Life expectancy is lowest in the north and highest in the south east. In Blackpool (north west) the life expectancy of men in 2022 was 10.3 years below that of men living in the richest part of the country (Hart, South East). For women the gap was 7.1 years.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dramatic improvements were made to life expectancy as a result of rapid public-health reforms. Sewer systems and access to clean water ended frequent cholera outbreaks, improvements in housing, nutrition and better infectious-disease control helped prevent premature death, especially in the very young. Significant too were improvements in maternal care. With the expansion of the welfare state and the birth of the NHS, life expectancy accelerated.

Despite deep welfare cuts by the Thatcher government, this trend continued until the 2010s. For the latter period of the twentieth century, it has been suggested that much of the improvement was down to people stopping smoking, along with developments in medical science.

The slowdown in improvements to life expectancy since 2010 and the rise in number of years spent in ill health coincided with the austerity drive of successive governments. 

Fuel poverty, drastic cuts to the NHS, loss of care and support for pensioners, and ever greater numbers consigned to living in poverty has had a significant and damaging impact on life expectancy. It is time Labour turned back the clock, our lives depend on it.

This article was originally published in the Counterfire monthly freesheet