Does your postcode determine how long you live?

The health and income gap

• The 10 places with the highest life expectancy are in the south of England
• 8 of the UK’s 10 richest areas are also in the south
• The 10 places with the lowest life expectancy are in the north, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland
• Most of the UK’s poorest areas are also in the north, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

In the ongoing debates around wealth inequality and healthcare disparities, an important question is raised: Is your postcode determining how long you live?

The study, conducted by income protection experts Eleos, analysed data from the Office for National Statistics on wealth, health and social care across regions in the UK, to help examine the link between wealth and health based on regional variations in Gross Disposable Household Income.
As of 2022, the average life expectancy across the UK was 82.06 years. Here are the places with the highest and lowest life expectancy and their relative wealth or poverty according to ONS analysis of the National Census.

The national picture

These are the extremes, revealing regional differences of up to 10 years. A wider look at the disparities across the UK confirms the pattern:

Is your income safe?

You can always make it safer

Get started

Paying for health

Any attempt to prove causation rather than correlation can’t be entirely conclusive, but the evidence is overwhelming. 

Gross Domestic Household Income (GDHI) - earnings after deductions such as income tax, NI and pension contributions - measures the spending power of the individual. GDHI has a huge influence on diet, with the healthiest foods generally commanding higher prices than cheaper, often heavily processed options. Access to fitness facilities also depends on the ability to pay. Most gyms are privately owned (4,500) and even those that are run by local councils (2,700) offer only limited free off-peak membership. Outdoor gyms are becoming more common in parks but recent research still predicts that 42 million adults will be overweight or obese by 2040 (Cancer Research UK). Meanwhile 1 in 10 children are obese by the age of 5, rising to 1 in 4 by the age of 11, with deprived children most at risk.

However, it’s not only GDHI that accounts for poor health and life expectancy. The NHS is free at the point of use, but the combination of staff shortages and 14 years of underfunding has seriously damaged its effectiveness, in both the treatment of illness and the delivery of preventive care.

England and the UK rank 20th and 21st among European countries in the ratio of doctors to patients, way behind Austria, Norway and Spain and even below Latvia and Slovenia. As for nurses, the NHS currently has 31,000 vacancies.

All of which should lead us to expect the nation’s poor health to be evenly distributed but for several reasons this isn’t the case.

• Private health insurance means those with higher GDHI can afford priority treatment from the best equipped providers.
• Uneven national distribution of resources (sometimes called the postcode lottery) means treatment levels are not consistent across the country.
• Higher population density in poorer areas puts the greatest strain on resources where they are often most needed.

However, without solving the problem of wealth inequality, there are some measures that can reduce the effect of disparities of income on the nation’s health. For hundreds of years, insurance has provided financial safety nets for all sorts of circumstances and income protection insurance is one of the most relevant to the needs of today. It provides important protection for people on every rung of the income ladder but in the sphere of health and longevity it can be especially helpful to those at the lower end of the scale. The sudden, unexpected loss of income through illness or injury can force people into relative poverty which means they’ll start cutting and saving pennies. The likely consequences include:

• Buying cheaper food that may have lower nutritional value
• Skipping meals altogether
• Cutting out gym memberships
• Abandoning dental treatment or resorting to DIY dentistry
• Cancelling private medical insurance

Income protection insurance gives people who become too ill or injured to work a regular replacement income. It can’t fix the nation’s health, but for people facing a sudden financial crisis it can make a significant difference to their ability to maintain good health and a long life, wherever they happen to live.

Sources: 

Life expectancy for local areas of Great Britain: between 2001 to 2003 and 2021 to 2023

Regional gross disposable household income, UK: 1997 to 2022

And supported by data from: SecEd, gov.uk, Mental Health Foundation, Mind, Royal College of Nursing, Dept for Education, Retail Trust, BBC, National Library of Medicine, ROSPA.