By Dipankar De Sarkar, IANS
London : Britons in professional jobs live longer than those in unskilled or manual occupations, new health statistics reveal.
According to data for 2002-2005 released by the Office of National Statistics here, life expectancy has risen for all social classes in Britain over the last 30 years, but there is also evidence of long-term inequality.
It shows that life expectancy for professional women shot up by 30 months to 85 years in the last four years alone, while the gap between the top and bottom classes widened. Poor diet, drinking and smoking are said to be taking a toll of women in manual or unskilled jobs.
The new data, derived from an ONS Longitudinal Study, cover the period 2002-05 for the first time. Published Wednesday, it studies life expectancy according to social class.
According to the data, people in professional occupations (Social Class I) have the longest expectation of life in Britain, followed by those in managerial and technical occupations (Social Class II). People in unskilled manual occupations (Social Class V) have the shortest expectation of life.
“There has been a longstanding difference in mortality in social classes, particularly between the highest and lowest classes,” said ONS statistician Brian Johnson. “But in women there is no evidence of further widening, and in men there is some tentative evidence of narrowing in the higher age groups.”
In the period studied, men in the professional class had a life expectancy at birth of 80 years, compared with 72.7 years for those in the manual unskilled class.
Women in the same professional class had a life expectancy at birth of 85.1 years compared to 78.1 years for unskilled manual class women.
Unskilled men aged 65 could expect to live a further 14.1 years, fractionally above the expectation of life professional men would have had in 1972-76 (14 years) when they became 65.
Unskilled women aged 65 had a further expectation of life of 17.7 years, less than professional women in 1972-76 (19.1 years)
Taking the period of analysis as a whole — from 1972-76 to 2002-05 — both men and women in non-manual occupations had a greater increase in life expectancy at birth and at age 65 than those in manual occupations.
For men in non-manual professions, there was an increase in life expectancy at birth of eight years as compared to 6.8 years for those doing manual work. For women, these figures were 5.2 years and 4.8 years respectively.
By contrast, between 1997-2001 and 2002-05, life expectancy for men at birth and at age 65 increased more for manual than non-manual groups. For women, estimates of life expectancy increased by a similar amount for both non-manual and manual work.
The British government’s social classification is divided into two categories — non-manual and manual. Within these, there are a total of six sub-classifications, aimed at providing researchers and policymakers a continuous method of social classification.
Social Class I (professionals) includes doctors, chartered accountants, and engineers; Class II (managerial and technical/intermediate) includes managers, journalists and school teachers; Class III N (skilled non-manual) includes clerks, cashiers, retail staff; III M (skilled manual) includes supervisors of manual workers, plumbers, electricians, goods vehicle drivers; Class IV (partly skilled) warehousemen, security guards, machine tool operators, care assistants, waiters and waitresses; Class V (unskilled) labourers, cleaners and messengers.
The ONS researches all aspects of British life, including migration, health, education, lifestyle and marriage, and makes its research findings public. The data are meant to inform debate and policy-making.
Two years ago, the British Medical Journal published life-expectancy data linked to where people lived, which showed that the health gap in today’s Britain was the biggest since the Victorian times.