Life expectancy in the UK falling compared to other developed countries in 2023
According to the Kings Fund recently, life expectancy has been a concern in the UK even before the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Increases in life expectancy slowed from 2011 in England and Wales for reasons that are unclear and contested.
While many other European countries saw this same slowdown in life expectancy growth between 2010 and 2019, the slowdown was greatest in the UK.
OECD data shows that the UK has among the lowest figures for female and male life expectancy at birth of all the countries in our basket, with only the United States reporting consistently lower performance.
This poor relative performance was evident even before the pandemic, though the falls in life expectancy during the first year of the pandemic are particularly striking in the United States, the UK, Belgium, Italy and Spain.
The authors of a recent study of life expectancy trends over the past 70 years charted the UK’s fall down the life expectancy league tables among a wider basket of countries.
In 1952, the UK had the 7th highest life expectancy at birth in the world, but by 2020 it had fallen to 36th place, just above countries that include the Maldives, Chile and Costa Rica.