YEARS of austerity leading to inequality and poverty across Scotland is still the biggest contributor to stagnating life expectancy among Scots, experts have said.
Last Wednesday, the National Records of Scotland (NRS) announced that life expectancy in Scotland increased slightly for both males and females for 2021-2023.
However, female life expectancy was 10.5 years lower in the most deprived areas compared with the least deprived, and similarly, male life expectancy in the most deprived regions lagged 13.2 years behind the least deprived, according to the NRS.
The national figures are also still down in comparison to where they were prior to the pandemic and most local authorities' figures are also still lower than they were pre-pandemic.
Life expectancy in Scotland peaked in 2012-2014 but then plateaued until 2017-2019 where it fell thereafter.
Pre-pandemic research by health experts came to the conclusion that the most important cause of the stalling of life expectancy in Scotland was the austerity policies that were brought in by the UK Government in 2010.
Research into the effect of those austerity policies on people's health showed that the inequalities created by cuts in government services and social security spending had a significant effect on the poorest groups of people.
Dr Margaret Douglas, a consultant for Public Health Scotland (PHS), said that when improvements in mortality suddenly stalled around 2012, inequalities began to increase and that the death rate among the most deprived people also started increasing.
“Life expectancy in the most disadvantaged 30% or 20% of areas has actually been going down, and that's really shocking,” Dr Douglas said.
Research over the last decade has shown that life expectancy has been getting worse for the poorest areas in Scotland, which equates to roughly 1.5 million people.
Dr Douglas added: “The cumulative impact of [austerity] has had a really significant effect on life experience and life expectancy, particularly for the poorest groups of people.
“So, for the groups of people that lost benefits, that put quite a lot of them into poverty and hardship.”
Dr Douglas explained that government services provide lots of different resources that people need to have a good quality of life.
These sectors include education, housing, and transport, and are the important “building blocks” to keep people healthy, she said.
“So because there's been a kind of cumulative effect of lots of pressures on all of these different services across the system, that is what has caused the stalling of life expectancy,” Dr Douglas said.
Due to life expectancy figures falling around 2012 a huge programme of research was undertaken by academics at the University of Glasgow, along with the Glasgow Centre for Population Health, and various other institutions across the UK.
Professor of wellbeing economy for the University of Glasgow and a consultant for public health, Gerry McCartney (below), said health inequalities have long been an injustice and a huge problem in Scotland.
McCartney highlighted that a significant shift in inequalities in Scotland can be traced back to the early 1980s due to changes in economic and social policies that were introduced by the Thatcher government.
“During the 1980s, Scotland had more council housing, which was then subsequently underfunded,” he said.
“It had more heavy industry, which again was purposefully targeted for closure, and attacks against the trade union movement, which disempowered working-class communities.
“It was more dependent on many of the public services that were privatised and so, Scotland's vulnerability was sort of revealed when that policy change happened during the 1980s.”
According to McCartney, Thatcher’s government’s policy in the 1980s created a divergence between Scotland's life expectancy trends and the trends in the rest of the UK and Western Europe.
These political and social changes have had a lasting impact on Scotland as life expectancy has historically been the lowest in the UK and in Western Europe for decades.
Brexit, the cost of living crisis, and Covid are also contributing factors which have had a cumulative effect on the mortality rate of Scots.
But McCartney said for health to improve, the austerity measures which have been implemented over the last 14 years need to be addressed, and in particular, the value of social security needs to be increased while reducing the conditions that people must meet to get them.
He added that increasing funding for core public services, such as local government, and protecting the population through regulating unhealthy industries would also make a positive impact.
“I think improving health is to narrow the inequalities in our society so that the health of our most disadvantaged populations can improve more quickly, and the average is obviously just an average, and it does, you know, hide a lot of those inequalities,” McCartney said.
“But because Scotland's inequalities are so wide, the average will always be quite low until we seriously attempt to reduce the social and economic inequalities in society that drive those health inequalities.”
