Life expectancy improvements grind to a halt

THE lifespans of men and women in Britain have stopped lengthening, a report revealed yesterday.

It found that after a century of routinely increasing life expectancy, improvements have almost halted since 2010.

The report from the office for National Statistics confirmed widespread suspicions of a halt to expanding life expectancy.

But analysts said they could not point to the reasons why a century of ever-longer lives appears to have come to an end.

Since the end of the First World War, life expectancy has been constantly improving thanks to medical advances, the near elimination of once-deadly diseases such as tuberculosis and scarlet fever, and economic and lifestyle changes.

These have meant far fewer men work in dangerous heavy industry such as coal mining, and smoking is a much rarer habit.

But, since 2010, the oNS said, the speed of improvement in life expectancy has dropped by 85 per cent among men in England and 95 per cent among women.

It said that between 1990 and 2011, the number of deaths among every 100,000 men dropped by 8.6 for each two-year period. But between 2011 and 2017, each twoyear period showed a drop of only 1.3 deaths for every 100,000. Among women, there were 4.3 fewer deaths for every 100,000 people each two years between 1990 and 2011. But after 2011 improvements ceased almost entirely, with a fall of just 0.2 per 100,000 for each two-year period.

After 2011 only 17 local council areas recorded life expectancy improvements for women, and just 26 for men, the oNS reported.

Its analysts said: ‘ Some researchers have pointed to the presence of more virulent strains of influenza affecting the more vulnerable older populations. However, this is contested as a long-term effect as varying predominant strains of influenza will only explain short-term fluctuations in mortality rates.’

The oNS also rejected the idea that austerity – state spending cutbacks – could be to blame.

A further possibility, the report said, was that the growing numbers of older people in the population may be having an impact.

other suggested explanations have included a slowing in the rate of medical advances.

And while men have been working in less dangerous jobs, women have been moving into high-pressured work in historic numbers.

The oNS said yesterday: ‘A statistically significant slowdown in the long-term improvement in age-standardised mortality rates for England and Wales took place around the early 2010s.

‘This was true for England and Wales, for both sexes, and for older and younger people.’