Health can be improved across the life course through enhanced prevention and even in later life with simple interventions. Strategies informed by our understanding of the biology of ageing are applicable to chronic health conditions arising from lifestyle and socioeconomic factors including obesity and diabetes, and acute infectious diseases including COVID-19.

Enabling data sharing across the life course in multiple sectors and harnessing technologies like Artificial Intelligence will accelerate our understanding of drivers of age-associated poor health and identify preventative health strategies and therapies with the potential to improve healthy life expectancy and to level up health across the UK.

Adding just one extra year of healthy life expectancy (HLE+1) will have enormous financial benefits estimated at $38 trillion in the USA. If we get it right, ‘healthy longevity’ could emerge as a high-growth discipline with significant commercial and societal potential and presents an exciting opportunity for the UK to become a world leader.