UK now the most unequal country in Europe apart from Estonia.

Nicholas Sowels, an associate professor at the Sorbonne makes the claim in a blog written for the London School of Economics that the UK is the most unequal country in Europe.

This is based on the amount of disposable income citizens have left after paying housing and other costs. By this measure the UK lags behind France, Germany, Poland and Spain, only Estonia is less equal.

The UK is also the most unequal English speaking country after the United States according to the OECD.

Neither fact is likely to make its way into the glossy brochures the government are preparing to send out with their trade envoys one Brexit is a done deal.

There are huge inequalities, Sowels writes, between the generations with the median income of the over sixties having risen by 11% between 2007 and 2015. Over the same period that of workers aged between 22 and 30 has fallen to 7% below where it was in 2008.

Inequality, along with cuts to public services and ‘reform' of the benefits system has been cited as a cause for the decline in life expectancy.

Data produced by the Office for National Statistics and analysed by Public Health England suggests that by 2041 the average life expectancy for a woman will be 86.2 years, for men it will be 83.4 years, a fall of one year since 2015, the last year for which figures are available.

In poor rural areas and former industrial towns, the decline in life expectancy has been even more dramatic. In Hartlepool, the average male lifespan is 76.4 years; for women in Derbyshire’s Amber Valley it is 82.4 years.

Inequality and cuts to public services have also been cited as contributing to the rise in children from disadvantaged families having emergency admissions to A&E units.

A report published by the Nuffield Trust last year shows that in 2005/06 children from deprived areas had twice the number of admissions to A&E with conditions like asthma compared to those living in more affluent areas. By 2015/16 this had risen to two and a half times as many, people in deprived social groups, the report found, are 55% more likely to have unplanned hospital admissions.

Cuts to school nurses and government benefit reforms have, again, been cited as contributing factors in the rise in unplanned admissions.

Speaking to the Guardian Nigel Edwards, chief executive if the Nuffield Trust said this was an ‘indictment of how we are looking after the most vulnerable people’.

Danny Dorling Professor of Human Geography at Oxford told the Independent ‘the fall in life expectancy in several geographic areas of England', was ‘most likely the result of the effects of public service cuts and austerity'.

Also speaking to the Independent Dr Wanda Wyporska executive director of the Equality Trust said, ‘in a country with high inequality, it is not surprising that we are seeing a decline in life expectancy’.






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