First the good news: we’re living longer in the UK, and men are slowly catching up with women. Now the bad news: the long-term narrowing of the gap in life expectancy between rich and poor has gone into reverse.
A I co-wrote shows that among males who reach adulthood, the longest-lived can expect to reach an age of 96.2, living 34.2 years longer than those who fare worst. This gap is 1.7 years wider than in 1993, when it was narrowest, making this the first step back since the 1870s.
For women, the situation is similar, but not so dire. The longest-lived can expect to reach 98.5 years, 31.5 years older than the shortest-lived. This gap was smallest in 2005, but has grown by 0.4 years. .
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The group whose lives are shortest is made up overwhelmingly of people who are poor. So why are they falling further behind for the first time since the Victorian era, after the gap narrowed in the decades to 1940 and then stayed the same for another 50 years?
Affording protection
The years before 1940 saw that were of most benefit to those worst-off. Clean water, improved sanitation, greater health and safety, affordable housing and cleaner air are obvious examples. Poor people gained most because better-off people could already afford more protective environments and lifestyles.
By the 1950s, this catch-up had all but paused. Obvious public-health gains were done and dusted, and advances in healthcare and medicine post-1950 tended to benefit all parts of society equally – so the life gap held pretty steady.
Now we know that in the 1990s it started to widen. Lifestyle is the most likely cause, especially bad diet, lack of exercise and alcohol and tobacco use – raising the risk of early onset of today’s big killers, such as heart disease and diabetes. Research shows that death rates at working age are more than twice as high in the poorest fifth of men as in the richest.
Damaging divide
It wasn’t always this way. Smoking, which still causes about one in six deaths, illustrates this well. Tobacco use grew from the 1920s onward, reaching a peak in 1948 when 82 per cent of men in Great Britain smoked, spanning both rich and poor. This compares with only 21 per cent today – with poorer men much more likely to be holdouts.
The rich-poor divide in damaging lifestyles is now so stark that it is widening the life-expectancy gap.
Action is needed to get back on course, but improving individual lifestyles may prove a tougher nut to crack than cleaning up dirty water and making work safer.
