Islington's Health and Wellbeing Board has approved a new strategy aimed at reducing the gap in life expectancy between different communities within the borough. The strategy, which spans from 2025 to 2030, will monitor progress through a comprehensive set of indicators, with a new data dashboard to be published on the council's website.
Key to the strategy is the aim to improve both life expectancy and healthy life expectancy across Islington, while specifically addressing the inequalities that exist between different groups. Data presented to the board revealed a significant gap in life expectancy between the most and least deprived areas of the borough, with men in the least deprived areas living, on average, 9.2 years longer than those in the most deprived areas. The primary drivers for this gap in men are identified as circulatory disease and cancer. For females, the gap is smaller and more spread across several causes, including respiratory and external causes.
Charlotte Ashton, Assistant Director of Public Health, presented the proposed outcomes and metrics. While life expectancy has seen improvements for both men and women in Islington, it remains below the London average. The London average life expectancy for men is 80.5 years, and for women is 84.7 years. Islington's current life expectancy for men is 78.7 years, and for women is 83.7 years.
A particular concern is the widening gap in life expectancy between men and women, which has risen to five years. This is illustrated in the stacked bar chart below, which shows the percentage contribution of different causes of death.
The strategy will focus on four priority areas: 'Start Well', 'Live Well', 'Age Well', and 'Healthy Environments', with a life course approach to tackle inequalities.
- Start Well: Interventions include efforts to increase the percentage of pregnant people referred to health visitor services, reduce smoking rates at delivery, improve booking rates for antenatal care, increase vaccination uptake for children, and address overweight and obesity in young children.
- Live Well: The focus includes improving uptake of cancer screening programs, reducing under 75 mortality rates from preventable causes, promoting smoking cessation, improving blood pressure control for hypertensive patients, increasing physical activity, and improving access to support for people with severe mental illness and substance misuse.
- Age Well: This priority area aims to create an age-friendly community, reduce social isolation, support residents to live healthy and active lives, and improve carer support.
- Healthy Environments: This area focuses on creating healthy homes, reducing carbon emissions, promoting active travel, taking a whole systems approach to promoting healthy weight, building links between residents and quality jobs, and promoting social connectedness and wellbeing.
Specific indicators for 'Start Well' and 'Age Well' are currently under development or require further confirmation. The strategy will monitor progress through a comprehensive set of indicators, with a new data dashboard to be published annually on the council's website for easy access. The board may also conduct focused deep dives into particular priority areas.
While 'disability-free life expectancy' will be removed as an indicator due to a lack of updated national data, the focus will remain on improving overall life expectancy and healthy life expectancy. The alternative metrics that will continue to be used to assess quality of life and healthspan are 'healthy life expectancy' and the 'life expectancy gap'.
The report states that there are no financial implications arising from the proposed measures and recommendations for the Joint Health and Wellbeing Strategy Outcomes Framework, as these are not currently quantifiable. If recommendations are made about the use of money or grants in the future, this will require a full set of financial implications. The full details of the strategy can be found in the Public reports pack for the Health and Wellbeing Board meeting on 17 March 2026 Public reports pack 17th-Mar-2026 13.00 Health and Wellbeing Board.pdf.
