Residents of Wokingham have the highest healthy life expectancy in the UK at 70.7 years, according to the Office for National Statistics.
This comes as a report from the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) documents significant growing inequality over the last decade in the UK.
The gap in healthy life expectancy has reached a 16.4 year difference between Blaenau Gwent in south Wales and Wokingham, Berkshire.
This difference in equality is as large as the gap between the UK’s overall healthy life expectancy and Sudan’s, according to the World Health Organisation.
Healthy life expectancy makes up one of the measures for the inclusive growth index. This index also includes unemployment and inequality levels, the amount of free time from work and consumer spending, with Wokingham also hitting the top.
The ‘inclusive growth’ index has been created to shift economic growth from centre stage, and instead to include quality of life measures.
Other factors including crime, employment and income, good quality education and access to affordable housing, are all documented to affect health inequality, as per a report by the Centre for Progressive Policy think tank.
The inclusive growth score marks the national average in the UK as 1. Wokingham has a score of 2.41, meaning that the Berkshire town has a 141% higher score than the national average.
The cities of Manchester and Nottingham fall below the national average with scores of 0.52 and 0.47 respectively. This places them just above Blaenau Gwent’s score of 0.46.
Liam Byrne, who leads the APPG warned of the dangers of regionally imbalanced economies.
He said: “If current trends persist, we’ll continue making the same mistakes; prioritising the quantity of economic growth and forgetting the deepening divisions that are splitting our society apart.”
According to the report, healthy life expectancy is warned to be the biggest driver of regional imbalances across the UK.
As former head of the civil service, Gus O’Donnell warns the government to make personal wellbeing a primary aim within government spending, residents of Wokingham find themselves in a more fortunate position than the rest of the country.
