For decades, rising prosperity was expected to bring longer, healthier lives. In the UK, that assumption is not realised. While overall life expectancy has broadly stalled, healthy life expectancy, which is the number of years lived in good general health, is now falling.
ONS data puts healthy life expectancy at around 60.7 years for men and 60.9 years for women. This does not mean people are developing chronic health problems before reaching the state pension age of 66 but in a lifetime there are just over 60 years in good health. These years may be interrupted by health problems in childhood, adolescence or young adulthood, not necessarily in old-age.
Diet, inactivity and obesity are major contributors to the UK’s deteriorating life-expectancy. High consumption of ultra-processed foods, sedentary work and widening obesity rates are driving earlier onset of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, musculoskeletal problems and poor mental health.
The decline in life-expectancy is not across all demographics. Deprivation is one of the strongest predictors of poor health, and the gap in healthy life expectancy between the most and least deprived areas of England is now close to two decades.
Many peer nations have protected healthy life expectancy by investing in prevention, primary care and local public health. The UK has relied more heavily on treating illness after it appears, while public health services, GP access, mental health support and routine care have all faced pressure.
Prevention and early detection is important as delayed diagnosis and treatment allow manageable conditions to become disabling.
Countries such as Japan and Norway show two useful routes: detect risk earlier and make healthier choices easier through policy, planning and community support.
Japan places strong emphasis on structured health checks for adults, while Norway embeds health into local government, transport, planning and equality policies. Both approaches treat prevention as a system-wide responsibility rather than an optional add-on to healthcare.
What can we do to reverse the decline in healthy life expectancy? We all need to consider prevention with diet and exercise as well as local and national governments investing in active transport, earlier screening, better mental health support, and sustained action on poverty and housing.
What can you do?
You can ask your local council what activities and programmes they have in place for people to access support with education with respect to long term health, what areas they have accessible to all to engage in physical and meaningful activity and what other public health measures and strategies they have.
Ask your MP what they are campaigning for to improve the education, health and wealth of their constituents.
Healthy life expectancy is an sound investment as the loss of productivity if unwell or the cost of treatment is needed will be less or avoided.
Read for help and advice here, https://www.nhs.uk/better-health/