It must have been about twenty years ago, when performance indicators, targets & league tables were just beginning really to take root in public administration. I was startled to see that one NHS performance indicator was ‘Deaths under the age of 65’. All of these were, by implication, avoidable with proper health care.
This startled me because since childhood I had basically thought that the death of anybody aged over 40, while desperately sad, & not all that common, was nevertheless not a great surprise. This was not just because 40 seemed unimaginably old, but because it did seem to be a fact of life.
There were always at least one or two half orphans in the class – some might be so because of the war, or its lingering after effects but others were due to death from cancer, accidents (industrial or traffic), heart attack or stroke. Women’s magazines quite regularly, if not frequently, carried articles about how to cope with widowhood. Any caring father had decent life insurance & the only market for endowment mortgages was among married men wanting to ensure that the loss of a husband & father did not also entail the loss of a home for his family (which otherwise could & did sometimes happen).
When I started work it seemed only right that men should pay additional pension contributions in aid of widows & orphans.
Twenty years ago, when I checked the mortality statistics, I found that death below the age of 65 had indeed become quite rare.
But it is just one more indicator of the astonishing & continued extension of longevity that the latest study of north/south difference takes as one measure ‘deaths under the age of 75’ which are much more likely to happen up North.
The differential is unlikely to disappear any time soon, not least because the North is likely to suffer more from cutbacks in government expenditure. The North is too dependent on the public sector, they say.
This is certainly true if we look at people of working age, who depend disproportionately on the public sector for jobs. But if there are proportionately so many more over-75’s in the South, consuming all those NHS prescriptions, high-priced interventions, expensive London Freedom Passes & gold plated pensions based on higher London salaries, might it not be the case that it is the South which is really riding the public sector gravy train?
