Cornish people 'living shorter lives than they should'

All six of Cornwall’s MPs are among a list of dozens of elected officials who have been criticised after new analysis revealed people in their constituencies are “suffering avoidable ill-health and living shorter lives than they should”. One of the world’s leading health equity experts, Professor Sir Michael Marmot, has written a damning letter to 58 MPs across England to highlight “particularly concerning health trends” in their constituencies.

His list of MPs includes Derek Thomas (St Ives), George Eustice (Camborne and Redruth), Cherilyn Mackrory (Truro and Falmouth), Steve Double (St Austell and Newquay), Sheryll Murray (South East Cornwall), and Scott Mann (North Cornwall). New analysis, by academics from the Institute of Health Equity at University College London (UCL), highlights which local areas are “falling behind” when it comes to health.

Researchers examined every local authority in England to plot levels of health, inequalities in health, and cuts in their spending power. They identified 17 local authorities with statistically significant increases in inequalities in life expectancy between 2010-12 and the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

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In a leader column in our sister print titles the Cornish Guardian, the Cornishman and the West Briton, the editor writes that it would be going too far to claim that having a Conservative MP is bad for your health, but it is striking that the lead author of a shocking new report on the UK’s worsening health inequality has felt it necessary to write to all six of this county’s MPs

Read the full leader column below

It would be going too far to claim that having a Conservative MP is bad for your health, but it is striking that the lead author of a shocking new report on the UK’s worsening health inequality has felt it necessary to write to all six of this county’s MPs – all of whom are Conservatives – urging them to do more to stop their constituents becoming chronically ill and dying long before their time.

Sir Michael Marmot’s report, whose findings are outlined on page 15, notes that life expectancy for both men and women has ceased to improve, as it had been until 2010-12.

He links this in part to the effect of the Covid pandemic, but also to a marked decline in the spending power of local authorities since 2010-11, as a government bent on headline-grabbing cuts in national taxation hacked back what it gave to hard-pressed local councils and forced them to slash much-needed local services which it would have been impossible to fund through council tax alone.

Covid is no excuse for this dire situation – life expectancy is rising in Europe, which also experienced the pandemic, while it stagnates or even declines in Great Britain – and it’s not as if any of this comes as a surprise. The Institute for Health Equity, which Professor Marmot leads, has been telling successive governments what to do about it for decades; the first Marmot Review was published in 2010, another in 2020 and, in the same year, a forensic analysis of everything this government got wrong about Covid (which runs to 221 closely spaced pages). The eight Marmot Principles for a healthier society cover everything from investing in early-years development and building communities to tackling discrimination and improving environmental sustainability; the blueprint could hardly be clearer.

His wise words seem, however, to have fallen on deaf ears (this government instead prefers to scrape up some cheap political capital by blaming the sick for being ill and GPs for diagnosing it) and now Sir Michael has had to take the extraordinary step of writing to 58 individual MPs – including not only Derek Thomas, George Eustice, Cherilyn Mackrory, Sheryll Murray, Scott Mann and Steve Double but also former Prime Minister Liz Truss and, with bitter irony, both “Levelling Up” Secretary Michael Gove and former Health Secretary Steve Barclay – to ask them kindly if they wouldn’t mind finding time in their busy schedules to perhaps do just a little more to stop their electors leading miserable lives of avoidable pain and sickness, and then dying too soon. Is that unreasonable?