Lizzy McNeill

speaker

375 appearances 10 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2018 last heard 18 Jul

Lizzy McNeill’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 5.

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More or Less · Does a fall in the UK's healthy life expectancy mean what you think it means? · 27 May 2026 podcast

Here's friend of the programme and an actual actuary at LCP, Stuart MacDonald.

Yep.

And because it's self-reported, it's heavily influenced by people's mood on the day of the survey and how healthy they think they should be.

Yeah, not so much.

So the ONS have just tried to calculate how many years on average a person is likely to rate their health as good or very good across a lifetime, not when those years actually take place.

Yeah, so that's a really good point.

And John Byrne Murdoch, Financial Times data journalist and yet another friend of the programme.

I know, right?

Anyway, John had the same thought as you.

So he dug into the figures used by the ONS and combined them with data from other surveys to see the overall mental and physical capacity trends across the different age groups over the past 10 years.

Now, to be clear, these trends aren't tracking actual diagnosed health conditions.

John's still using what people say about their lives.

In John's broader survey data, the decline in mental health is largest in the people aged 16 to 24, and the decline gets smaller as the age gets higher.

And when he ran a statistical analysis on the overall trend, the pattern was clear.

And this is where the subjective nature of the survey data is really important.

So John pointed out that an increase in awareness and cultural acceptance of mental health issues can lead to more people identifying and being open about their mental health struggles.

So they're more likely to report these issues, which would show up as a deterioration of healthy life expectancy.

I mean, bad for healthy life averages, but in other contexts, arguably a good thing.

This also means the data is vulnerable to being skewed, as this awareness and acceptance may not spread evenly throughout society.

So healthy life expectancy could be tracking an actual decline in mental health, or it could be tracking different ways of thinking about mental health.

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