Britain’s health inequality gap widening
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Health inequalities are widening in Britain despite government efforts to narrow the gap, a group of independent experts said on Thursday.
Life expectancy in the wealthiest areas is seven to eight years longer than in the poorest areas despite improvements in the health of the population as a whole, the Scientific Reference Group on health inequalities said in a study.
“This report gives no grounds for complacency that enough has yet been done,” the group’s chairman, Professor Sir Michael Marmot, said.
“We’d still like it to be as good in the worst-off groups as it is in the best—and it’s improved more rapidly in the best off than it has in the worst off—but it’s improved dramatically right across the board,” he told BBC radio.
Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government has pledged to reduce the health inequality gap, measured by infant mortality and life expectancy, by 10 percent between 1997 and 2010.
But figures show that on both counts the gap between the poorest and the population as a whole has increased.
The report, commissioned by the Department of Health, found the gap in life expectancy between the bottom fifth and the population as a whole had widened by two percent for males and five percent for females between 1997-1999 and 2001-2003.
The gap in the infant mortality rate was 19 percent higher in 2001-2003 between the poorest and general population, compared to 13 percent higher in 1997-1999.
The report said, however, that progress had been made on child poverty and improving housing. The gap has also narrowed for cancer and heart disease death rates.
Marmot said the reduction in child poverty, from 24 percent to 20 percent between 1999 and 2004, would lead to greater health equality, but not by 2010.
To tackle inequality, the report recommended a broad approach, looking at the circumstances in which people live and work, the ways children are raised and standards of education.
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