There’s a headline saying the UK death rate reached a record low last year. The article explains that the rate is trending down slowly. But we at Legacy Futures are still talking about the number of deaths trending up over time. What’s going on?

The risk of someone in the UK aged over 80 dying this year is lower than it’s ever been, and falling slowly. But our ageing population structure means there are more people in the UK aged over 80 than there have ever been, and that is rising. So we do still expect the number of deaths to increase over the coming years.

It’s all down to what we’re trying to understand, and what we mean by ‘death rate’. If we look at crude death rates, we see one picture, but if we look at age-standardised mortality rates, we see a different one. They’re not contradictory, but they are telling us different things. We’ll look at both in turn.

Crude death rate

The first death rate we’ll look at is the crude death rate. This is the most important one when we’re trying to make sense of legacies.

This is nice and simple: it’s just is the number of people who die each year. The more of those there are, the more chances there are for someone’s generous gift to charity in their will to take effect.

This has been steadily increasing since around 2010 as the population bulge, the people born in the baby boom of the 1940s and 1950s, start to reach the older ages at which people die in greater numbers.

On top of that rising trend, we had the Covid-19 pandemic, which caused the crude death rate to shoot up in 2020 and 2021. Then in 2022 and 2023 we had a terrible winter with pressures on urgent care. However, the last two winters (23/24 and 24/25) have not been so bad as that, in terms of weather and seasonal viruses, so the number of deaths in 2024 (about 648,000) was lower than it’s been since the pandemic. We are now more-or-less back on the long-term rising trend driven by the population bulge. So we expect more deaths in 2025 (about 665,000, according to the ONS).

By the time we get to 2030, we expect more deaths (about 696,000) than we saw in 2020, the worst year for Covid (about 689,000). Given the age structure of the population, we are confident that this trend of rising crude death rates will continue into the 2050s.

This is the most important picture for legacies and we’re confident it is unlikely to change in broad terms, although of course there will be year-to-year fluctuations: the number of deaths is rising.

Age-standardised mortality rate

The second death rate we’ll look at is the age-standardised mortality rate. This is a better measure when we’re trying to make sense of the health of the nation, and gives us a different, complementary picture.

It’s also a bit more complex to work out.

When we’re trying to make sense of the health of the nation, the crude death rate is potentially misleading. There are more people dying, but there are more old people, and we know old people are more likely to die than young people. The[DC1] way to control for that effect is to calculate age-standardised mortality rates that take in to account how many people there are of each age in the population each year. That makes it a fair comparison of how well the health system – broadly considered – has been in terms of keeping people alive.

These rates are what the actuaries at the Continuous Mortality Investigation calculated for the figures in the article from the BBC. (It is a really good article and worth your time.)

When we look at those figures, the story is different. All through the 20th century and up to 2010, the age-standardised mortality rate was steadily falling over time, as spectacular improvements in life expectancy were made. However, from 2011 on, the trend is much flatter – basically, we’ve seen no improvements in life expectancy since then. (Pandemic and the bad winter of 2022/23 aside.)

The reasons for this flattening in the trend of improvement are a matter of debate. One argument is that this is largely the result of austerity in the public sector from 2010, and the worsening of public services. Others disagree and argue that the ‘easy wins’ for health improvement have already been made, like cutting smoking rates. That is undoubtedly a factor, but some other countries are still making improvements despite this.

The government came in to power promising to improve the NHS, but they acknowledge that changes will take some time. [DC2] [KF3] So in the next few years we probably won’t see a return to the rapid improvements in age-standardised mortality rates we saw before 2010. They’re likely to fall very slowly, or remain static.

Coming back to legacies, we do care about what happens to this rate, because it will influence the number of people dying each year. If, for example, we get a dramatic improvement in age-standardised mortality rates – perhaps if the new weight-loss drugs are taken up much more widely, and they significantly improve mortality for a wide swathe of the population – we would expect the crude death rate, the actual number of people dying each year, to fall. That would have a downward effect on the number of legacies we’d expect[KH4] [DC5] . But those legacies will be pushed back, rather than disappearing.

The underlying ageing population bulge is a very big, long-term effect and we expect that to outweigh improvements in health.

Finally

When people say simply ‘death rate’, especially in the media, it’s not always clear what they’re talking about. Different death rates show different things, which are useful for different purposes. When we’re thinking about health, we want to disregard the effect of the baby boom to look at the underlying rates; when we’re thinking about legacies, we don’t want to disregard the baby boom, since that’s a huge factor affecting the number of people who could leave a legacy to charity each year.

The BBC article about the CMI figures correctly shows that the age-standardised mortality rate is falling slowly, and that’s the most important measure for thinking about health. But the crude death rate, the number of people dying each year, is the more important measure for thinking about legacies, and that is on a rising trend. We expect the baby boom to mean that trend continues until the 2050s.