People in the UK are spending fewer years in good health than a decade ago, prompting concern that the population’s health is “going backwards”. The sharp decline in Britain’s healthy life expectancy, the amount of time someone spends free of illness or disability, is in sharp contrast to its recent rise in most other rich countries globally. The UK population’s health is poor, getting worse and not undergoing the same steady improvement seen in countries such as Japan, Norway and Spain, according to a new analysis of healthy life expectancy in 21 countries by the Health Foundation thinktank. It went up by an average of four-tenths of a year across the 20 other comparable countries. Healthy life expectancy for men in the UK has fallen from 62.9 years in the 2012-14 period to 60.7 years in 2022-24 and from 63.7 to 60.9 years for women over the same timeframe, it found.…