ONS: UK Life Expectancy

Lord Davies of Brixton Excerpts

Thursday 17th December 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord is entirely right that this stalling of the life expectancy curve is extremely worrying, and he is right to emphasise the disappointing results in deprived communities, where, as he says, we are going backwards instead of forwards. Covid has shown how that has a huge impact on the resilience of the nation’s public health. The Government are committed to this agenda—we published a prevention Green Paper and we are committed to building a strategy out of that Green Paper, and since then we have done work on better health, on obesity and on other areas of life expectancy—but I agree with him that more can and should be done.

[Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)]

My Lords, it is clear that there has been a downturn in the rate of mortality improvement since 2010, and the evidence is that the impact of these negative trends has been greater among more deprived groups, with some suffering an actual decline in their expected lifespan. Does the Minister accept that a significant reason for this has been the imposition of austerity policies since 2010 under successive Conservative Governments?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

No, I do not.