Austerity: Life Expectancy

Stephanie Peacock Excerpts

Wednesday 18th April 2018 Westminster Hall

[Louise Haigh (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered austerity and changes in life expectancy.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Paisley. Life expectancy is the statistical analysis of that most basic feature of health, life itself. Through these linear annals, since the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign, the health and wellbeing of this nation have been catalogued. Life expectancy serves as the statistical testimony of the social history of our country. Through it are revealed the national crises and epidemics, the giant leaps forward in public health and the great workplace, environmental and social reforms that have marked the last two centuries of change.

In the first collection, published in 1841, the English life table gave female life expectancy as 41 years and male as 40. The changes that followed in the subsequent 180 years have seen those doubled. The turn of the 20th century saw a dramatic drop in infant and childhood mortality as sanitation and living standards improved. Improvements in the treatment of infectious disease, the creation of the NHS, the Clean Air Act 1956 and improvements in maternity care, living standards and incomes followed, and with them rises in life expectancy that were sustained for almost a century. Neither wars nor global convulsions could stem the inexorable upward rise.

That was the great era of a remarkable revolution in public health. By 2011, women’s life expectancy had reached 83 and men’s 79. With three months added with each passing year, a little girl born in Sheffield in 2011 had every right to expect to live to be 100 years old. Those assumptions were not based on any great improvements or medical discoveries, but simply on the fact that our health was improving and would continue to do so.

However, since 2011, something unusual and, in modern British history, unprecedented has happened to life expectancy: it has flatlined. For the first time in well over a century, the health of the people of this nation has stopped improving. It is of course axiomatic that life expectancy cannot increase forever, and that a slowdown in growth would eventually occur, but it is the sudden and sustained rise in mortality rates that has so concerned public health professionals and should concern us as parliamentarians.

The period from July 2014 to June 2015 saw an additional 39,074 deaths in England and Wales, compared with the same period the previous year. While mortality rates fluctuate year on year, that was the largest rise for nearly 50 years, and the higher rate of mortality was maintained throughout 2016 and into 2017. Provisional figures on the number of weekly deaths indicate that winter mortality was higher than usual in early 2015, 2017 and 2018.

Those recent trends contrast starkly with the long-term decline in age-specific mortality rates throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Now, research published in The BMJ has revealed the shocking fact that 10,000 more people died in the first seven weeks of 2018 than in the same period in 2017. The study finds no external factor that might have caused the 11% rise: no unusual cold snap, natural disaster or flu outbreak outside normal expectations. The Office for National Statistics has gone so far as to revise down its official life expectancy projections by almost a whole year, compared with the projections of just two years ago. That means 1 million further earlier deaths are now projected over the next 40 years.

The Financial Times has reported that the deceleration of previous rises in life expectancy has cut £310 billion from future British pension fund liabilities. As Professor Danny Dorling of the University of Oxford has noted, what is happening with life expectancy,

“is no longer being treated as a temporary decline; it is the new norm.”

Dorling and Dr Hiam have looked at other extraneous factors to explain those projections. A rise in birth rates? No—birth rates are falling. More migration? The ONS now projects less inward migration over the next 40 years.

How then to explain an increase of 40,000 deaths on what was projected for this year, and an extra 25,000 deaths for next year? We can only conclude that there has been a sharp deterioration in the collective health of this country. Dominic Harrison, Director of Public Health for Blackburn and Darwen, and an adviser to Public Health England, has said that the figures are a “strong and flashing” amber light that,

“something is making the population more vulnerable to avoidable death.

We know that in some areas the picture is even more concerning, with higher death rates and life expectancy falling. Research has pinpointed 29 areas where we see falling life expectancy for women; chief among them are seaside towns and post-industrial areas.

[Stephanie Peacock (Barnsley East) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. Barnsley, the area I represent, has one of the lowest life expectancies in the country. Does she agree that post-industrial towns such as Barnsley need more funding and resources to tackle the inequality between north and south?

[Louise Haigh]

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend. She makes an important point, because it is exactly those post-industrial towns and regions that were invested in so heavily under the last Labour Government and have seen a fall in life expectancy over the last seven years.

Regional and class inequalities in health, as we know, are nothing new, but there is a more distinct change now taking place. In my city of Sheffield, the healthy life expectancy for women of 57.5 years has dropped by four years since 2009, while healthy life expectancy across the country has basically held steady. There are already too many areas in our country where healthy life expectancy is unacceptably low. The average baby girl born in Manchester between 2014 and 2016 will live to be 79, but only until age 54 will she be healthy. That is almost one third of her life spent grappling with health issues that will not affect the average woman born on Orkney until she is 71 years old.