Poverty at the end of life in the UK

These findings provide new insights into the risk and prevalence of poverty in the last year of life for people across the UK. We estimate that every year, more than 90,000 individuals experience poverty during the last 12 months of life. The results show that the risk is starkly different for people of working age compared with those who are post-retirement. While overall mortality is dominated by older age groups, those of working age have a substantially higher risk of being in poverty at the end of life.

These headline estimates are likely to reflect two different issues. On the one hand, we know that experiencing poverty increases the risk of being in ill health across the life course – people who are already experiencing poverty therefore have a higher mortality risk, so these findings partly reflect the fact that poverty can make death more likely at a given age. On the other hand, ill health and subsequent mortality can also be a cause of poverty – particularly for those of working age who may suffer loss of earnings, in addition to the costs associated with terminal illness, and who therefore move into poverty as a direct consequence of their condition. However, regardless of the direction of causality the fact remains that experiencing poverty can make already difficult circumstances even harder for people at the end of life.

We explore causality in more detail in the second part of the analysis, which looks at poverty trajectories in the last five years of life. The results suggest that many people are already experiencing poverty in the years before their death and are therefore particularly vulnerable to the additional financial pressures associated with ill health. However, a significant minority only move below the poverty line in the last two years of life, suggesting that ill health could be a driver of financial hardship in these cases. Working age families with children and those in minority ethnic groups are at particular risk of moving into poverty in the last two years of life. We also find that being diagnosed with a new health condition and leaving the labour market tend to coincide with movement into poverty.