Editor's Comment: For decades, life expectancy in high-income countries like the UK and the US steadily improved, a testament to advancements in healthcare, social support systems, and public services. Yet, starting in the early 2010s, this progress began to unravel. In the UK, austerity policies gutted public services and eroded social safety nets, leading to rising mortality rates and a reversal in life expectancy gains. The US has not been immune to similar trends. During the COVID-19 pandemic alone, an estimated excess of 400,000 of the 1.2 million Americans lost their lives, many of them needlessly, due to government malfeasance and the chaotic, harmful policies of the Trump administration. The parallels between the two nations are alarming.
As the US faces the aftermath of a recent election that has brought Trump back into power, concerns are mounting about the future of public health. With questionable appointees now poised to influence America’s healthcare leadership, the stakes have never been higher. The lessons of austerity in the UK should serve as a dire warning for what happens when governments prioritize cost-cutting and ideology over the well-being of their citizens. If ignored, these decisions could usher in a new era of preventable deaths and deepened inequality. This is a call to attention—and action—for us all. - Robert Jennings, InnerSelf.com
In This Article:
- What is the link between austerity and declining life expectancy?
- How did austerity policies affect public health in the UK?
- Why are disadvantaged communities disproportionately affected?
- What does "social murder" mean in this context?
- How can the UK reverse the damage caused by austerity?
- What role did COVID-19 and inflation play in mortality trends?
Life Expectancy in Decline: How Government Shaped the Crisis
by Gerry McCartney and David Walsh, University of Glasgow
Between 1945, when the second world war ended, and the start of the 2010s, average life expectancy and mortality rates in high-income countries improved continuously. But from around 2012, in the UK and in several other countries like the US, Germany and the Netherlands, the rate of improvement slowed, stopped, or even went into reverse.
The trends for people living in more disadvantaged areas were even worse, with mortality rates (the number of deaths per 100,000 people in a population) actually increasing for those living in the poorest 20% of areas in the UK. Our new book, Social Murder? Austerity and Life Expectancy in the UK, shows how austerity policies have been the most important cause of this change in trends, leading to hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths in the UK alone.
Austerity can mean different things. Economists tend to define it as the introduction of policies to reduce the size of government deficits. That is, the gap between what governments spend and the amount of tax revenue they raise.
More broadly, austerity is a policy approach associated with public sector restructuring (including privatisation) and increased labour market flexibility (the degree to which workers’ employment rights and security of work have been eroded), as well as reduced spending or increased taxes.
In the UK, the 2010 Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government introduced a large austerity programme. This reduced real-term spending on a range of public services. Some of the largest cuts fell on local government and social security benefits for working-age people. These cuts disproportionately affected poorer areas and people already on low incomes.
Over the following 14 years, the cuts intensified. They left public services and the social fabric of the UK in tatters. Unsurprisingly, the consequences for health have also been catastrophic.
Many studies have been undertaken to evaluate the impact of austerity policies on health and mortality in the UK. They show that cuts to local government funding overall, as well as to particular services including housing, culture, environmental and planning services, all had detrimental impacts. Cuts to the real value of social security benefits and greater conditions on people receiving benefits, were shown to have damaged mental health.
Internationally, countries that introduced austerity policies were found to have worse mortality trends. A systematic review that brought together the evidence from all those studies confirmed this link.
Yet despite this plethora of evidence, many UK public health agencies and thinktanks have ignored or downplayed the role of austerity in these catastrophically changed trends. This has been hugely damaging.
Austerity policies were identified as detrimental to health from the aftermath of the 2007/8 financial crisis onwards. But government body Public Health England, independent charity the Health Foundation and independent thinktank the King’s Fund all suggested that there was not enough evidence to identify austerity as a cause of the changed trends in the UK.
This sowed confusion about the role of austerity for a prolonged period of time, and allowed government ministers to repeatedly hide behind these organisations’ reports.
Other causes of excess deaths
Although austerity is the most important cause, other factors have also impacted on the mortality trends. In the UK, the rise in obesity up to 2010 is likely to have had a harmful effect. Subsequently, the COVID pandemic (including the disruption to the economy, social networks, education and healthcare), and then declining real incomes due to high inflation, are both likely to have caused substantial additional deaths. However, austerity has been the principal driver.
The public health impact of austerity-style economic policies have long been understood. Given this knowledge, what justification can there be for adopting these policies in 21st-century Britain, and in other wealthy countries around the world?
Political theorist Friedrich Engels stated that “when society places hundreds … in such a position that they inevitably meet too early and an unnatural death” it amounts to “social murder”. As public health researchers, we argue that social murder may be an apt description of the policies introduced after 2010 in the UK, and elsewhere.
If mortality rates are to be improved, it is essential that the Labour government in the UK, and other governments around the world, understand the evidence, quickly reverse the erosion of public services and social security systems and protect those at greatest risk.
Gerry McCartney, Professor of Wellbeing Economy, University of Glasgow and David Walsh, Senior Lecturer in Health Inequalities, University of Glasgow
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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careArticle Recap
This article explores the link between UK austerity policies and declining life expectancy. Beginning in 2010, public service cuts, reduced social security benefits, and increased labor market flexibility led to worsening mortality rates, especially in disadvantaged areas. Studies confirm austerity’s detrimental effects on health and mental well-being. Additional factors like the COVID-19 pandemic and inflation compounded the crisis. Researchers call for urgent policy changes to rebuild public services and improve health outcomes.
