UK Mortality Rates

Lord Sikka Excerpts

Thursday 12th January 2023 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Lord Sikka]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the paper by the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health Bearing the burden of austerity: how do changing mortality rates in the UK compare between men and women? published on 4 October 2022.

[Lord Sikka (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to open this debate and to welcome the noble Lord, Lord Evans of Rainow, to the House and to the ministerial merry-go-round. I look forward to hearing his maiden speech.

All too often, Ministers come to Parliament to present cold numbers about taxes, spending cuts, wages, pensions or benefits freezes and make absolutely no mention of the human cost associated with their plans. Never-ending austerity continues to deprive people of good food, housing and healthcare. It creates hunger, disease, anxiety, insecurity and mental health problems, huge waiting lists for hospital treatment and, ultimately, premature death. I have been in this House for just over two years now but have never heard any Minister explain the ethics of austerity or the human consequences of their cold decisions.

The paper Bearing the burden of austerity: how do changing mortality rates in the UK compare between men and women? was written by four renowned international scholars and published in October 2022. It reported that between 2012 and 2019 there were nearly 335,000 excess deaths in England and Scotland. The death toll includes over 250,000 men and 84,000 women. The cause of death is austerity imposed by the Government. The research methodology behind the paper is well articulated in it, if anybody is interested in critiquing it. Between 2012 and 2019, the Government handed billions in tax cuts to corporations and the rich. They also handed hundreds of billions in quantitative easing to speculators and gamblers. This free money fuelled asset price inflation and produced a record number of billionaires. However, the same process was not used to alleviate poverty, and the Government condemned millions to poverty. By 2019, some 14.5 million people, 22% of the population, were living in poverty. This included 8.1 million working-age adults, 4.3 million children and 2.1 million pensioners.

Since 2010, the Government have incessantly attacked low and middle-income families. The real wages of workers have been supressed and even today, the average real wage is lower than in 2007. Public sector workers have been especially targeted and have received below inflation pay rises. This hits women hard because more than half of the public sector workforce is female. Workers’ share of GDP in the form of wages and salaries is barely 50%, compared to 65.1% in 1976. No other industrialised nation has experienced this rate of decline in the wages of its workers. Low wages result in low savings, so people do not have an adequate buffer or resilience for a rainy day. The less well-off have a shorter life expectancy. The cause is not some invisible hand of fate but the visible hand of a Government who have impoverished people and condemned them to early death.

Lone parents, the disabled, carers, the unemployed and those experiencing hard times are particularly targeted by the Government. Women make up the majority of social security recipients and have been more affected by social security cuts and benefit freezes, which basically punish the poor for being poor.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has stated:

“From 2013-2019, ministers chose to reduce benefits in real terms by freezing their value or increasing them by a lower rate than inflation”.


If that was not bad enough, the Government also increased taxes on the less well-off. In 2010, the Government increased the standard rate of VAT from 17.5% to 20%. Inevitably, a greater proportion of less well-off people’s income goes in taxes. An analysis published by the TaxPayers’ Alliance, which is much closer to the Government’s ideology and cannot be accused of being a leftie organisation, stated that families in the lowest income categories paid 47.6% of their gross income in direct and indirect tax in 2017-18, compared to 33.5% paid by the richest 10%. Regressive tax policies continue.

The underfunding of public services has condemned perhaps millions, but certainly thousands, to hardship and death. In 2010, NHS England had a hospital waiting list of 2.5 million. By 2019 that had ballooned to nearly 4.5 million, due to underfunding, and now stands at 7.2 million. In 2016, the outcome of Exercise Cygnus informed the Government that the NHS would not be able to cope with a flu pandemic, but they still reduced the stock of PPE and the number of beds. Too many people have paid for that decision with their lives.

The Government’s taxation, wages, social security, public spending and other policies have inflicted death on innocent people. The paper which is the subject of this debate particularly draws attention to the gendered nature of the austerity, and notes that among poorer populations, death rates have worsened to a greater extent among females than males. Yet I have never seen a Conservative Budget that explains the gender impact of the Government’s policies. The last Budget, in November, mentioned women just once. There was really nothing there for women at all. I look forward to the Minister’s response and hope that he will refrain from citing the usual gaggle of this or that support being given to people, because none of that has prevented the death toll to which I referred.

We have just celebrated Christmas and its message that “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”, yet it hard to see any of that spirit in the Government’s policies when they focus only on the richer neighbours. Despite all the evidence, the deadly austerity policies continue. Can the Minister explain what the squeeze on low and middle-income families has achieved? People can clearly see that it has increased neither prosperity nor the happiness of the people. Millions rely upon food banks—tacit confirmation that government policies have failed. Schoolchildren are going hungry, while senior citizens are forced to make choices between heating and eating. Social squalor is increasing. Austerity has impeded economic development and deepened inequalities. It has increased insecurity and anxiety, and the need for health and social care. The underfunding of essential services has denied life to many.

During the Second World War, bombings by the Luftwaffe caused about 70,000 civilian deaths. Yet this Government have condemned 335,000 people to death, all in the name of some defunct economic ideology. Have any other UK Government inflicted this level of harm on their own people? If so, perhaps the Minister will name them. Every deceased person was someone’s relative or friend. Millions will live with that pain, knowing that their deaths were avoidable. What satisfaction do the Government get from their austerity policies? I would be grateful if the Minister, who speaks here for the Government, could commit to three specific pledges: first, to appoint an independent inquiry into the deaths caused by the Government’s policies; secondly, to redistribute income and wealth to reverse grotesque levels of inequality; thirdly, to ensure that the impact assessment of all Bills is accompanied by an assessment of the human consequences of the policies they contain.