My guess is you keep across the news. You know Andy Mountbatten-Windsor has just had the worst birthday ever; that tall hotels in Dubai don’t make for a great holiday right now; and that Keir Starmer’s engagements diary for 2027 will be remarkably clear.

Still, there is one headline I’ll bet you haven’t seen, even though it directly affects your life. It’s about your life, and mine, and those of our families and friends and neighbours. I didn’t spot it either, until a few days ago when the Guardian ran a reader’s letter.

It came from Alan Walker, a retired professor at the University of Sheffield. Why, he asked, hadn’t this newspaper made more of the latest “shocking” figures on healthy life expectancy? I looked up the report from the Office for National Statistics, and he’s absolutely right: the findings are indeed “momentous”, and they should be on the front pages, because they expose a serious truth about the state we’re in.

The figures show this: a child born this morning in Britain can expect to be in good health only until they are 61. The last 20 years of their life will be blighted by illness: dodgy hearts, painful joints, an inability to get about. Our healthy life expectancy has been dropping for years; it is now the lowest since 2011, when records began.

For most of the past 100 years, the UK and other rich countries have made outstanding progress on life expectancy. Year after year, decade after decade, the outlook has just kept getting better. Whereas a century ago the average life expectancy was about 50, today you can hope to live into your 80s. And now in Britain one of the great success stories in human history is going into reverse. Over........

© The Guardian