The Government Actuary's Department was formerly responsible for producing national life tables, which give statistics on expectation of life. Every ten years the department prepared a set of graduated (smoothed) life tables for England & Wales (known as the English Life Tables) and for Scotland, using data for years around a census. Each year ungraduated interim life tables were produced for the United Kingdom and each of its constituent countries, using data for a period of three consecutive years.
On 31 January 2006, responsibility for the production of national life tables transferred to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Current and historic life tables are still available on the GAD website. However, any life expectancy related enquiries should be directed to ONS. Click here for contact details.
For the latest interim life tables, click here.
For historical interim life tables from 1980-82 onwards, click here.
Selected life expectancy figures from both the latest and historical interim life tables are published in:
In such publications, the interim life tables are often labelled as belonging to the middle of the three years; thus, for example, the 1998-2000 tables are labelled as 1999. Selected life expectancies are also published in the Annual Abstract of Statistics.
The expectation of life figures shown in the Interim life tables are period life expectancies. These give, for a given age and area, the average number of years a person would live, if he or she experienced the particular area’s age-specific mortality rates for that time period throughout his or her life. It makes no allowance for any later actual or projected changes in mortality. In practice, death rates of the area are likely to change in the future so period life expectancy does not therefore give the number of years someone could actually expect to live. Also, people may live in other areas for at least some part of their lives.
Cohort life expectancies are calculated using age-specific mortality rates which allow for known or projected changes in mortality in later years and are thus regarded as a more appropriate measure of how long a person of a given age would be expected to live, on average, than period life expectancy.
For further information on the difference between period and cohort life expectancy and access to additional period and cohort life expectancy data tables please click here.
