Poor health taking ‘huge toll’ on people’s incomes, report shows

The UK’s poor record on health is taking a huge toll on people’s personal finances and job prospects, according to a new report by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) think tank.

The onset of illness costs people up to £2,200 of their annual earnings, according to an IPPR study of the most recent seven years of panel data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study. The data spans five years before the pandemic broke out, and the first two since it began in early 2020.

Researchers from the IPPR’s Commission on Health and Prosperity found that:

• Someone with a new physical illness experienced on average a fall of around £1,800 in their annual earnings, before the pandemic
• In the same period, those with a new mental illness faced an average fall in annual earnings of around £2,200
• 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

They 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 study found that loss of earnings following sickness 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.

For many, these costs prove life changing. Among those diagnosed with a long-term illness since the pandemic, two in five lost 10 per cent or more of their earnings. Chronic physical conditions are estimated to have driven 700,000 people to leave employment in the same period, forgoing all their earned income.

Job loss was the biggest driver of lost earnings. The report found that poor health was 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.

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.

The report 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

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 said.

The report called for a new Health and Prosperity Act, modelled on the 2008 Climate Change Act. This would hardwire two ambitious new missions in law:

•  To make the UK the healthiest country in the world within 30 years;
• To increase healthy life expectancy to beyond the state retirement age across every region.

As it stands, the UK has both a lower healthy life expectancy and a lower rate of improvement in healthy life expectancy than other high-income countries.

Professor Dame Sally Davies, Co-Chair of the IPPR Commission on Health and Prosperity and former Chief Medical Officer for England 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?’