General health
Higher social groups report best health
Self-assessed general health: by age, 2001, UK
In the 2001 Census, 40 million out of the 59 million people living in the UK rated their general health in the last year as 'good', a further 13 million rated it as 'fairly good', while 6 million people rated their health as 'not good'. Children (aged 0 to 15) had the highest rate of good general health at over 90 per cent, with an additional 8 per cent rating their general health as fairly good.
Rates of good health decrease steadily with age with corresponding increases in rates of fairly good and not good health. While individuals aged 65 and over account for just 16 per cent of the population, they represent 40 per cent of all those in not good health.
Men were more likely than women to report good health with rates of 74 per cent and 71 per cent, respectively. The overall difference between the sexes in rates of not good health was just 1 percentage point (7 per cent and 8 per cent respectively) once the age distribution of the population was taken into account.
Rates of not good health varied between 8 per cent in England to 11 per cent in Northern Ireland; rates for Scotland and Wales were 9 and 10 per cent respectively. Variation between rates of not good health between Government Office Regions (GORs) in England was wider, with a clear north-south divide. The GORs with the lowest rates of not good health were the South East and East (6 per cent) and the highest were the North East and North West (10 per cent).
Self-assessed general health (age standardised): by NS-SEC, 2001, UK
There were substantial variations in reported health status by social group. Among those in employment, rates of not good health for people in routine occupations were more than double those for people in higher managerial and professional occupations (8.6 per cent and 3.4 per cent respectively). Those who had never worked or were long-term unemployed had even higher rates of not good health (18.5 per cent).
Other indicators of social position, such as housing tenure, also point to a social divide in health status. In 2001 those living in social housing had the highest rates of not good health, twice as high as those who rent privately and three times higher than owner-occupiers.
Sources: Census 2001, Office for National Statistics; Census 2001, General Register Office for Scotland; Census 2001, Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency
Notes: It can be assumed that the form filler answered the general health question on behalf of young children.
NS-SEC: National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification
Data on housing tenure is only provided for Great Britain because Northern Ireland uses a different coding system from the rest of the UK to describe tenure.
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