New report shows the UK is getting poorer and sicker

Patients with new health conditions experience on average a fall in annual earnings of £2,200, according to a new study looking at the cost of poor health on employment and earnings.

Since 2020, someone with a new chronic physical illness experienced on average a £1,400 annual earnings fall, while the onset of a mental illness has meant an average annual earnings fall of around £1,700.

Healthy people, prosperous lives is the first interim report of the IPPR Commission on Health and Prosperity. It found that the UK is getting poorer and sicker, at the same time as the country is facing a challenging economic outlook. After rapid progress on life expectancy in the 20th century, the UK has rising rates of death and impairment – including higher prevalence of long-term conditions and greater rates of multimorbidity.

The report looked at the most recent seven years of panel data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study. The data span five years before the pandemic broke out, and the first two since it began in early 2020.

It also found that the onset of chronic illness since 2020 has also had an impact on others living in the same household as the newly unwell person, with their annual earnings falling by around £1,200 on average. The loss of earnings was driven by factors including people leaving their job, working fewer hours, or not returning to work when they might have done so if in better health. These are additional to other costs of sickness, such as paying for healthcare, increased energy usage, or the cost of travel to appointments.

Poor health was also a factor for more than half those who left their jobs (56%) before the pandemic, with a larger impact since. Among older adults, poor health often led to early retirement.

UK does worse on health than most other comparable countries

Much sickness in the UK is preventable – through better housing, better jobs, action on public health challenges like obesity, or access to the best treatments and social care. Yet UK governments have systematically failed to pull the right levers over the last three decades, the report says.

The IPPR Commission on Health and Prosperity – with commissioners including Lord Ara Darzi, Dame Sally Davies, Mayor Andy Burnham, Sir Oliver Letwin and Dr Halima Begum – challenges the government to do better on raising overall national health, and as a result to reap the wide economic benefits.

Professor Dame Sally Davies, co-chair of the IPPR Commission on Health and Prosperity, former chief medical officer for England and master of Trinity College Cambridge said:   “We now know that the UK does worse on health than most other comparable countries – and that this has a tremendous human and economic cost. We also know exactly what policies and innovations could transform health. So it is mystifying why UK politicians, across all parties, have failed to take decisive action.

“We need a radical increase in our national ambition – equivalent to the Victorian efforts to transform sanitation and clear slums. Why shouldn’t Britain be the healthiest country in the world?”

Lower incomes and poor health

The report also found that people with lower incomes are likely to be worse affected by becoming ill. Following the onset of a chronic illness, around one in six of those already in the lowest income quartile left employment during the pandemic, compared to around one in 20 of those in the highest quartile.

This unequal impact is compounded by the fact that people on low incomes are more likely to experience sickness, and less likely to get the best possible care. It found that the impact of lost income is also unequal by gender, region and ethnicity in the UK.

According to a new analysis applied by IPPR, improvements in people’s health would have different impacts on the earnings of different groups. It found that:

• Better health would improve the incomes of all women as a group at twice the rate of men
• Levelling-up on health gaps would increase regional earnings most in Wales, the West Midlands and the North East
• Workers from Bangladeshi or Pakistani backgrounds would benefit financially the most from better health

Lord Ara Darzi, leading surgeon, former health minister, Paul Hamlyn Chair of Surgery at Imperial College London and co-chair of IPPR’s Commission on Health and Prosperity, said: ”The UK is suffering from more sickness while real incomes are falling. This work sets out the compelling evidence that these are not unrelated trends. The report reveals the stark financial damage to those with long-term illness, and the damage to all of our prosperity caused by poor health.

“Policymakers risk being pennywise but pound foolish by focusing too much on the costs of tackling chronic health problems and too little on the economic, social and individual benefits of greater investment in the nation’s health. There is much more that could be done with new, early interventions to preempt disease before it damages lives.”