Health gap prompts warning that the NHS cannot act alone

Wales cannot close its health gap through the NHS alone, the Future Generations Commissioner has warned, calling for prevention to shape spending on housing, employment, transport and food. Derek Walker’s intervention on 15 October follows the Welsh Government’s Wellbeing of Wales report, published on 1 October. He says decisions across public services affect health long before people need treatment, and wants ministers to show how budget choices address those causes.

What the figures measure

The government report puts healthy life expectancy at birth in 2022 to 2024 at 58.5 years for females and 59.2 for males. Both measures fell for a fourth consecutive reporting period, even as overall life expectancy improved. Healthy life expectancy means expected time in good or very good health. It is different from total lifespan. The report says the gap between the most and least deprived areas reached 18.1 years for males, its widest on record. The commissioner puts the corresponding gap for women at approximately 19 years. These are comparisons between areas grouped by deprivation. They do not predict how long an individual will live or establish that moving postcode changes someone’s health by a fixed amount.

Prevention and the next budget

Walker wants prevention treated as a shared responsibility, with warm homes, fair work, accessible healthy food and cleaner surroundings considered alongside healthcare. He is renewing his call to protect prevention funding ahead of the autumn supplementary budget. His office plans to launch a prevention-budgeting tool on 22 October to help public bodies identify what they spend on preventing problems. That is a planned launch, rather than evidence of a new funded programme already operating. The government report’s national milestone is to increase healthy life expectancy and narrow the deprivation gap by at least 15% by 2050. Its latest findings show the gap widening instead.