It is a very fair point that health is, importantly, attitudinal. It is not a matter of just taking a medical model for this. I accept that point.
However, where we have an unbroken record, which is the time spent free of disability, which runs from 1981 to 2010, the figure for men in Great Britain rose
by 2.9 years and by 2.8 years for women. It is possible to take a rather more encouraging attitude towards our healthy life expectancy compared with some of the gloom I sometimes hear. The House of Lords report, Ready for Ageing—the Filkin review to the noble Baroness referred, concluded:
“The Government were right to raise the state pension age, but they are now adopting a timetable of increases slower than that recommended by the Turner Commission and will have to revisit this with rising healthy life expectancy”.