Tag Archives: marmot

“Society has stopped improving”

By Katharine Pindar | Fri 28th February 2020 - 4:58 pm

That is the bleak message of Professor Sir Michael Marmot in his major new report on health inequality. Entitled ‘Health Equity in England: the Marmot Review 10 Years On’, it assesses lack of progress in the last decade, since his review in 2010 entitled ‘Fair Society, Healthy Lives’.

He writes:

Since 2010 life expectancy has stalled: this has not happened since at least 1900. If health has stopped improving it is a sign that society has stopped improving.

This damage to health has been largely unnecessary.

Health is closely linked to the conditions in which people are born, live, work and age, and inequities in power, money and resources.

He repeats the well-understood expectation that, “The more deprived the area, the shorter the life expectancy”, but finds that inequalities in life expectancy have increased. “Among women in the most deprived areas, life expectancy fell between 2010/12 and 2016-18.” For both men and women, he continues, the largest decreases in life expectancy were seen in the most deprived 10% of neighbourhoods in the North-East, and the largest increases in the least deprived 10% of neighbourhoods in London.