From the Sunday Times, October 30, 2005:

By Richard Woods

MAKE sure you have plenty of plans for your retirement. New research into longevity has estimated that the average professional woman now in her twenties is likely to live into her mid-nineties.

Separate figures support that life expectancy for women in all social groups could even come close to 100 for people born in 20 years' time if health continues to improve at the rate of recent decades.

Men's life expectancy is also catching up with women. But longer lives could prove disastrous for those who have to fund lengthier retirements - pension funds and the taxpayer

The results may prompt the government and others to revise upwards the amount of money it will have to set aside for retired civil servants, especially since it caved in to union demands earlier this month and delayed raising the public sector retirement age.

"Life expectancy has been accelerating for more than the past 40 years," said Stephen Richards, an actuarial expert and co-author of the study. "It's not obvious why it should slow down any time soon."

The new analysis is based on mortality data held by the Government Actuary's Department. It finds life expectancy is rising more quickly than previously thought. The authors say that, barring unforeseen disasters, this will continue thanks to healthier childhoods and medical advances.

Richards' analysis contradicts some recent research which has found that modern health worries - particularly obesity - will reverse other gains. A study published earlier this year in the New England Journal of Medicine warned: "From our analysis of the effect of obesity on longevity, we conclude that the steady rise in life expectancy during the past two centuries may soon come to an end."

Richards believes such trends will have only a limited impact on overall mortality. He finds that the year-on-year improvement in survival chances of people born in 1931 was only about 1-2% a year early in their lives. That later accelerated to 2-3% a year, then to 3-4%. "Most recently, it has been over 4% per annum," he said.

Although every socio-economic group has benefited, those in the highest groups still enjoy the greatest life expectancy and women are still projected to live longer than men.

One obvious factor underlying the improvements has been a decline in smoking, but Richards also identifies falls in infectious and respiratory diseases affecting children or babies in the womb with dramatic declines in later mortality.

This prospect of future improvements is likely to make the government revise its life expectancy figures upwards. "A woman aged 65 in socioeconomic group one can already expect to live 21 years," said Richards, whose findings were presented last week to the Institute of Actuaries, which forecasts future trends on behalf of the pensions industry. "Allowing for future improvements you could add a couple of years to that." The cycle is likely to continue, he added.

So startling are the projected increases in longevity that the government is to abandon the idea of assuming there is a ceiling to life expectancy.

The government's own "high-level" projections are remarkable. A woman aged 60 in 2040 can expect to live another 34 years compared with 22 years in 1981; for a man the figure is 32 years compared with 18 in 1981. By 2046, the average 25-year-old woman, across all social classes, will have a life expectancy of 100 (though this is not a conclusion Richards has reached).

© Copyright The Sunday Times 2005. Original online article.