The prime minister has put forward his bold proposal for a universal, NHS-style social care service. In doing so, Andy Burnham has put the spotlight back on one of the major challenges facing almost everywhere in the world: how to manage the demographic changes linked to an ageing society.

It’s an important discussion. But what if government didn’t just look at how to care for people in their later years and instead spent real political capital on policies to help people live longer independently, and in good health? The data isn’t pretty on this. While the trend over the past half-century in almost all countries has been for people to live longer, healthy life expectancy has been consistently falling.

The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show that in 2022-24, healthy life expectancy at birth was just 60.7 years for men (77% of life) and 60.9 years for women (73%) across the UK, despite life expectancy being 79.1 years for men and 83.0 years for women. In Scotland it is even worse: for 2022-24, healthy life expectancy at birth was 59.1 for men and 59.4 for women, numbers that continue to decline.

The data points to a major problem in ageing societies: that a growing number of the years we have gained in........

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