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.
