Your article “Less than 10% of men will reach pension in good health” (Report, June 15) suggests that the vast majority of men will be in poor health by the time they reach pension age. As someone who is just coming up to his 67th birthday and in good health, I was surprised to read this.
I looked into the matter further. It turns out the IPPR report is concerned with “healthy life expectancy at birth”. This is a far-from-intuitive concept. It is the number of years of healthy life which someone born in a particular cohort can expect to have.
In working this out the IPPR have disregarded everything about family circumstances and used a single statistic, the local authority in which the child was born, to predict healthy life expectancy. So if a boy is born in Birmingham, his healthy life expectancy is 59 years, regardless of his background.
If we want to know what the chances are that a boy born today will reach age 67 in good health we need to multiply together two factors: the probability that a newborn boy will reach age 67, which is 84 per cent, and the probability that a man aged 67 will be in good health, which is 62 per cent.
The resulting probability is 52 per cent. So a true headline would read: “More than half of men will reach pension age in good health”. That is much more reassuring.
Robert Simons
Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, UK
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