I am very grateful to the noble Baroness for her advice, but we want to make sure that future Governments look at this themselves, take a proactive approach to the review process and are transparent and conscious about what they are commissioning. Stipulating now all the variables and all the factors to be taken into account restricts rather than supports that responsibility. Greater discretion will also allow an iterative approach with future Governments building on the reviews of previous ones.
A lighter touch approach will help to generate more debate at the time when the state pension age review is conducted. This should encourage all interested parties across Parliament and industry to feed in their thoughts and contributions and involve them better in the process.
The noble Baroness and, indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, discussed quite a lot of the factors. I do not wish to get into a huge debate about healthy life expectancy, and so on, but I will make just make a few points on it. The first is to warn noble Lords that the ONS measure of healthy life expectancy from 2000 onwards was changed to run in comparison with our EU partners, so we do not have a consistent data run for the whole period, although we have evidence that shows that healthy life expectancy has increased consistently since the 1980s. Do not use the run because there is a discontinuity in it.
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The other factor that I would suggest noble Lords look at is not just the good or the very good figures for health but the figures for fair health. On average, men and women aged 65 can expect to maintain good or very good health until their mid-70s and expect to maintain at least fair health until their early 80s. This equates to spending almost 90% of life remaining at age 65 in very good, good or fair health. On that measure—I think it is in terms of healthy life expectancy, good or very good—we rank third in Europe.