Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they have taken, following their response to the health and social care statistical outputs consultation, to rationalise disability statistics on health inequalities.

In the response to the Health and Social Care Statistical Outputs consultation, published in November 2024, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) set out some changes to statistical publications in the health inequalities space to rationalise statistics to make the landscape easier to navigate.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) stated that it would merge ‘Health state life expectancies by national deprivation deciles, England’, ‘Health state life expectancies by national deprivation quintiles, Wales’, ‘Health state life expectancies, UK’ and ‘Life expectancy for local areas of the UK’. The ONS has merged the ‘Health state life expectancies by national deprivation deciles, England’ and ‘Health state life expectancies by national deprivation quintiles, Wales’ releases. ‘Health state life expectancies, UK’ and ‘Life expectancy for local areas of the UK’ have not been merged, and the ONS is still exploring options for merging these publications.

The health state life expectancies releases have previously reported on disability-free life expectancy, but the ONS has temporarily paused production of this statistic while developing improvements to how healthy life expectancy is measured. The ONS intends to resume publishing disability-free life expectancy, potentially with an improved methodology, once a new methodology for healthy life expectancy is agreed.

DHSC has set out that we are exploring the best way to implement merging the ‘Health inequalities dashboard’ with the ‘Segment tool’. This change has not yet been implemented as DHSC is working towards creating a new service for public health data on GOV.UK. We are considering whether the data from the ‘Health inequalities dashboard’ and the ‘Segment tool’ can be made available in this new service.