People in the UK are spending fewer years in good health than a decade ago, prompting concern that the population’s health is “going backwards”.

The sharp decline in Britain’s healthy life expectancy, the amount of time someone spends free of illness or disability, is in sharp contrast to its recent rise in most other rich countries globally.

The UK population’s health is poor, getting worse and not undergoing the same steady improvement seen in countries such as Japan, Norway and Spain, according to a new analysis of healthy life expectancy in 21 countries by the Health Foundation thinktank. It went up by an average of four-tenths of a year across the 20 other comparable countries.

Healthy life expectancy for men in the UK has fallen from 62.9 years in the 2012-14 period to 60.7 years in 2022-24 and from 63.7 to 60.9 years for women over the same timeframe, it found.

It means that the proportion of life a man spends in good health is down from 79% to 77% and, for a woman, from 77% to 73%, the analysis by the Office for National Statistics showed.

The decline in Britons’ health in recent years is so significant that, in more than 90% of the UK, people now start suffering from illness before the state pension age of 66, the study revealed.

“These findings reveal a stark truth – the UK’s health is going backwards”, said Dr Jennifer Dixon, the Health Foundation’s chief executive. “The lights on the dashboard are flashing red. We are the most obese country in western Europe, mental ill health has surged to unprecedented levels and more people than ever before are living with chronic health conditions.”

The thinktank said that obesity – which is leading to more cases of diabetes, heart disease, stroke and cancer – and high numbers of deaths caused by alcohol, drugs and suicide help explain the loss of two years of illness-free life. But people’s worsening self-reported health and deep health inequalities between rich and poor are also key factors, it added.

Neither Covid nor overall life expectancy, which remains stable, lie behind the fall. “This suggests that the UK’s deterioration is not inevitable, but reflects country-specific factors,” the analysis concluded. Health experts see healthy life expectancy as the best way of measuring a nation’s health. It is calculated using mortality rates and self-reported health surveys.

“The UK’s health is declining and falling behind most other comparable nations,” it added.

The report found that the UK was one of only five countries where healthy life expectancy has declined, and it had fallen from 14th to 20th in the 21-nation international league table, with only the US below it.

The findings help explain why a record 2.8 million people are too sick to work, deaths are rising among 25- to 49-year-olds and growing numbers of 16- to 24-year-olds are not in education, employment or training because they have a physical or mental health condition, the thinktank added.”

Responding to the grim picture painted by the analysis, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said the fact that the UK population is getting more unhealthy was a “disgrace”. It pointed to the tobacco and vapes bill, which will get royal assent this week, and ban on advertising junk food before 9pm on television as evidence of its “radical” approach to tackling the problem.

The fall in the length of time people enjoy good health had a “huge human and economic cost, with poor health driving people out of the workforce and locking young people out of education, employment and training, adding to the rising cost of welfare,” Dixon added.

Governments have done too little to address a rising burden of often avoidable illness, she said. “Successive governments, including the current one, have known this but failed to take the action needed. Turning the tide requires a new approach that goes far beyond patching up the NHS to tackling the root causes of poor health,” she said.

Ministers should force food firms to make their products healthier, introduce minimum unit pricing of alcohol in England, as Scotland has done, and tackle drug-related harm, Dixon urged.

The UK has deep and widening inequalities in healthy life expectancy. It is highest in wealthy Richmond upon Thames, London, where the average man enjoys 69.3 years and average woman 70.3 years in good health. However, in contrast, an average man in Blackpool gets just 50.9 years and the average woman in Hartlepool only 51.2 years.

Labour’s manifesto pledged that it would “tackle the social determinants of health, halving the gap in healthy life expectancy between the richest and poorest regions in England”.

A DHSC spokesperson said: “It is a disgrace that as a nation we became unhealthier over the last decade which is why we are committed to tackling health inequalities and building a healthier Britain.

“The government is already delivering radical measures such as a generational ban on smoking and clamping down on junk food advertising targeted at kids to help parents raise the healthiest generation of children ever.

“We know there is much more to do, but by building an NHS fit for the future, we will help people live well for longer, whatever their background.”