Pensions - Articles - WTW on Public Health England's life expectancy trends report

 "It sounds dramatic to say that 2014 life expectancies at older ages were the highest we've ever seen. But life expectancy has been on an upward trend so you’d expect this to be true in most years. What really matters is that life expectancy has recently been improving less quickly than expected.

 "On the measure of life expectancy used by Public Health England, a 65 year-old man in England could expect to live for 18.6 years in 2014, compared with 18.3 years in 2012. But the 2012-based expectation for life expectancy at 65 in 2014 was 18.9. So 65 year olds are expected to live longer now than two years ago, but by less than we thought at the time.

 "It's this worse-than-expected outcome that matters for pension schemes, who were already budgeting for improvements. This is also why, unless the Government changes the formula used to increase the State Pension Age above 67, it is now expected to rise less quickly than previously thought.

 "This report focuses on 2014, when mortality rates in England did reduce relative to the year before. But 2014 followed a couple of years when improvements in mortality rates stalled. What's more, 2015 appears to have been a particularly bad year with mortality rates actually increasing relative to 2014. The rapid improvements in life expectancy seen in England until recently have been interrupted; the question is whether this is a blip or the start of a new trend.

 "It's important to understand that the life expectancies in this report are only an estimate of how long people could expect to live if the current mortality rates were to stay the same for ever. If chances of surviving at each age continue to improve, the average age that people live to will be older than the headline life expectancies in this report."