Lifemap: data releases and site changes

A privacy page

2026-10-02T00:00:00Z

2 October 2026 — privacy · Site update · no published figure changed

A new privacy page says who is responsible for Lifemap and which services see a visit: GitHub Pages, which hosts the site; Clicky, which counts page views without cookies; postcodes.io, which turns a postcode into a council; and jsDelivr, which serves the map library. Lifemap sets no cookies, stores nothing in the browser and does not keep the postcodes people search for. Every page links to it from the footer.

How Lifemap applies the Code of Practice for Statistics

2026-09-26T00:00:00Z

26 September 2026 — trustworthiness, quality and value · Site update · no published figure changed

The methodology has a new section on how Lifemap applies the Code of Practice for Statistics. The Code sets the standards for official statistics, and the Office for Statistics Regulation encourages producers of other statistics to apply it voluntarily. The section takes each of the Code’s ten principles in turn, under trustworthiness, quality and value, and says where Lifemap falls short. It is Lifemap’s own commitment, not an endorsement by the regulator.

Pages for the UK, its four nations and England’s nine regions

2026-09-26T00:00:00Z

26 September 2026 — the UK, its nations and regions · Site update · no published figure changed

New pages bring together the figures for larger areas. They come from the same ONS releases as the council figures (2022–2024) and are compared in the same way: “above” or “below” only when the 95% confidence intervals do not overlap.

Life expectancy in the UK: life expectancy and healthy life expectancy for men and women with their confidence intervals, the four nations and England’s nine regions compared with the UK and England, the trend since 2001–2003, the lowest and highest councils in each nation, and a short explainer on why life expectancy is not the average age at death.
A page for each nation: England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, each compared with the UK, with its trend, its figures at 65, its lowest and highest councils and a table of every council that can be sorted by any column.
A page for each of England’s nine regions, from the North East to the South West, compared with England, with the region’s upper-tier councils and districts listed separately.
In the dataset: ONS’s figures for England’s nine regions, each English council’s region (also in the council CSV), and trend series for the UK, the nations and the regions in the trends file. No existing figure changed.
Council pages: the breadcrumb links to the nation’s page and, in England, to the region’s. Page titles and search descriptions for councils and rankings name the place as people search for it (“Glasgow”, “Hull”) and give the figure and period.
Homepage: a note by the postcode search that Lifemap shows averages for council areas, not a personal estimate, with a link to ONS’s own life expectancy calculator.

Corrected figures, confidence intervals in the dataset, and search by council name

2026-09-24T00:00:00Z

24 September 2026 — v0.6.0 · Release 0.6.0 · dataset version 26 September 2026

A release driven by a full review of the site’s data, copy, accessibility and engineering. Every figure in the story, press page, press kit, methodology and sources is now calculated from the dataset when the site is built, so those pages use the same numbers as the council pages and cannot go stale.

Corrections

These figures were wrong or out of date on the live site. We are sorry for the errors.

UK healthy life expectancy was given on the press page as 63.1 years for men and 63.6 for women. The ONS figures for 2022–2024 are 60.7 and 60.9.
The range between councils was given as about 18 years for men (Blackpool to East Dunbartonshire) and 21 for women (Barnsley to Orkney). It is 22.0 years for men (Blackpool to the Orkney Islands) and 24.0 for women (Merthyr Tydfil to the Orkney Islands).
The story compared Blackpool with Westminster, describing Westminster as having some of the highest figures in the UK. Westminster’s life expectancy is among the highest, but its healthy life expectancy (60.5 years for men, 59.8 for women) is close to the UK figure. The story now compares the English councils with the lowest and highest healthy life expectancy on the average of men and women, Blackpool and Richmond upon Thames, and shows the figures for men and women separately.
Smoking: the story said rates ranged from low single digits in London boroughs to the high teens in the north-east. Across English councils they range from 3.2% in Woking to 20.8% in Boston.
Sources and coverage: the story listed sources Lifemap does not use (deaths registered, alcohol-related harm) and described Scotland and Wales as partly covered (every council has figures); life expectancy was credited to the healthy life expectancy release. The methodology said Scotland and Wales measured obesity at BMI 30 or over; since July 2026 England, Scotland and Wales all use BMI 25 or over.
Deprivation: the press page gave the difference in men’s healthy life expectancy between England’s most and least deprived tenths of neighbourhoods as 19.4 years, subtracting ONS’s rounded figures. ONS publishes the difference, calculated before rounding, as 19.5 years (20.3 for women).
Deprivation chart: the homepage chart also subtracted ONS’s rounded figures, showing 19.4 years for men in England. It now shows the difference ONS publishes, 19.5 years.

New

In the dataset: ONS 95% confidence intervals for life expectancy and healthy life expectancy, figures at age 65, and trend series back to 2001–2003 (life expectancy) and 2011–2013 (healthy life expectancy); for England, inequality in life expectancy within each council (slope index of inequality) and IMD 2025 deprivation scores.
Search by council name or postcode district as well as postcode. Each result links to the council’s page, and the address bar names the council, never the postcode.
Press page: key findings calculated from the data, an embed snippet generator with live preview, and a printable press kit.
Methodology sections on confidence intervals, survey periods by nation, averages of men and women, county and trust figures, trends, and annual versus census-based estimates.
Data downloads at /data/: every council and every field as CSV as well as JSON, the trend series as JSON and CSV, a file for each council, a data dictionary, and a suggested citation.
Rankings at /rank/ for life expectancy, healthy life expectancy, years in poorer health and the five lifestyle measures, within each nation and tier of council. Life expectancy and healthy life expectancy are ranked for men and women separately, with 95% confidence intervals and a comparison with the national figure.
Council directory at /area/: one table of every council, grouped by nation, that can be filtered and sorted.
Trend charts on council pages read out the figures for any three-year period: move the pointer over a chart, tap it, or reach it with the Tab key and step through the periods with the arrow keys. Each reading gives the figures for men and women with their 95% confidence intervals; every figure is also in the table under the chart.
Neighbourhood figures: after a postcode search in England or Wales, the homepage shows life expectancy and healthy life expectancy, with confidence intervals, for the neighbourhood (middle layer super output area) the postcode is in, from ONS’s census-based estimates for 2019–2023. English district pages show the district’s own census-based healthy life expectancy next to its county’s annual figure. Both are labelled as census-based and not comparable with the annual figures, and are kept apart from them. The source and the files are listed on /sources/.
Atom feed of data releases and site changes at /feed.xml, generated from the same list as this page.

Changed

One set of numbers everywhere: averages of men and women are stored once in the dataset, rounded the same way, and read by every page.
English district and Northern Ireland results lead with the county’s or trust’s figures, clearly labelled as theirs.
The embed widget covers every council, lists unpublished figures instead of drawing them as zero, carries the full licence line and runs no analytics.
Fonts are served from lifemap.org.uk, so pages no longer contact Google, and a content security policy limits what pages can load.
Accessibility: skip link, keyboard-operable controls, visible focus, stronger contrast, and no sideways scrolling on small screens.
The monthly data refresh now opens a change for review, with a before-and-after coverage table, instead of updating the dataset directly.

Removed

The “speed of ageing” lifestyle widget. It turned a reader’s habits into a personal-looking figure from coefficients that were not published evidence, which is the kind of individual prediction Lifemap exists not to make.
The old pre-Astro pages. The site now serves one copy of the dataset, at /uk_la_data.json.

No published figures changed

2026-09-01T00:00:00Z

1 September and 1 August 2026 — monthly data checks · Automated rebuilds

The monthly pipeline re-read every source. No upstream figure had changed, so the only difference in the dataset was the timestamp of the run.

Welsh lifestyle figures move forward three years, via Public Health Wales

2026-07-05T00:00:00Z

5 July 2026 — Wales refresh · Live on production

Welsh smoking, higher-risk drinking, physical-activity and 5-a-day figures now come from Public Health Wales’s Public Health Outcomes Framework (accredited official statistics, derived from the National Survey for Wales), using the 2021/22–2022/23 pooled period for all 22 principal areas — replacing the 2019-20 values that had been frozen since the StatsWales platform migration took the LA-level lifestyle tables offline.

One caveat, disclosed rather than hidden: PHOF publishes these as age-standardised percentages, while the equivalent English and Scottish figures are crude prevalence. The definitional thresholds are identical (>14 units/week, 150 minutes/week, current smoker, 5+ portions); the standardisation typically moves a figure by a point or two. Each Welsh metric’s source note says so explicitly.

Overweight incl. obesity stays on NSW 2019-20 (BMI ≥ 25, crude) — PHOF publishes no all-adult weight measure. It is now the only remaining 2019-20 Welsh value.

England’s smoking figures now come from the same kind of source as Scotland’s and Wales’s

2026-07-05T00:00:00Z

5 July 2026 — England smoking source · Live on production

England’s smoking column now uses the Annual Population Survey estimate (OHID Fingertips indicator 92443, self-reported, adults 18+, latest period 2022–24) instead of the QOF GP-register prevalence (91547, latest 2022/23). More recent — and, more importantly, all three covered nations’ smoking figures are now self-reported survey estimates: England’s APS, Scotland’s Scottish Surveys Core Questions and Wales’s National Survey for Wales. GP-recorded and survey-reported smoking rates measure genuinely different things; a cross-nation column should not quietly mix them.

England values shift modestly (Westminster 13.4 → 12.7, Manchester 17.0 → 14.2); the England reference line moves from 14.7 to 10.9.
Ribble Valley has no APS estimate and now shows “—” rather than a substituted GP-register value.

Scottish data moves to SHeS 2021–2024, and the obesity column finally means the same thing everywhere

2026-07-04T00:00:00Z

4 July 2026 — Scotland refresh · Live on production

All 32 Scottish councils’ higher-risk drinking and physical-activity figures now come from the Scottish Health Survey’s 2021–2024 pooled window (published October 2025), replacing the 2019–2023 pool.

More importantly: Scotland’s overweight-and-obesity column now uses the BMI ≥ 25 “overweight including obesity” measure — the same threshold England and Wales use — instead of the stricter BMI ≥ 30 “obesity only” series. The threshold mismatch we’ve disclosed since April is gone; the column is now directly comparable across all three covered nations. Scottish values jump accordingly (Edinburgh reads 58% rather than 21%) because the measure now includes the overweight band — not because anything changed in Scotland.

5-a-day stays on the 2016–2019 pool: re-checked against the new dashboard — no later window exists for this indicator because the survey’s COVID-era switch to telephone interviewing broke comparability.
Smoking stays on the Scottish Surveys Core Questions 2023 (a much larger pooled sample than SHeS alone).
The only remaining threshold mismatch on the site is Northern Ireland’s HSC Trust figures (BMI ≥ 30), which are shown as labelled Trust-level context, never as council values.

Six councils were showing "UK average" instead of their own figures

2026-07-04T00:00:00Z

4 July 2026 — lookup & data-integrity audit · Live on production

A full audit of the lookup path and data pipeline found — and fixed — two silent failures. First, postcodes in St Helens, King’s Lynn and West Norfolk, Bournemouth Christchurch and Poole, Herefordshire, Armagh City Banbridge and Craigavon, and Newry Mourne and Down (around 1.4 million residents) were falling back to the UK-average panel: postcodes.io returns those names with commas, apostrophes and full stops, and the site’s name-matching didn’t fold punctuation the way the dataset’s keys do. All six now resolve to their real records; verified against live postcodes.io.

Second, Barnsley and Sheffield had been quietly frozen at April data vintages. The Government Statistical Service re-coded both councils after their April-2023 boundary changes; ONS workbooks use the new codes while OHID Fingertips still publishes under the old ones, so every monthly rebuild lost their lifestyle figures and fell back to preserved values. The pipeline now recodes on every fetch, and both areas track upstream releases again.

Also in this audit

Embed widget now serves all 380 councils (it previously charted only a 33-area sample). Metrics that aren’t published for an area are listed as such — never charted as a zero.
Labels caught up with definitions: the map and embed now say “Overweight incl. obesity” (BMI ≥ 25) with scales matched to the real 40–80% range, and lifestyle reference lines use England national values labelled “Eng avg”.
Story figures re-verified against the ONS 2022–2024 healthy-life-expectancy series: the Blackpool–Westminster healthy-years gap for men reads about 10 years on current data.
Pipeline hardening: inequality-breakdown rows can no longer be mistaken for area values, and the test suite now runs in CI on every change and before every monthly data refresh.

Healthy life expectancy moves to ONS 2022–2024 for all four nations

2026-07-01T00:00:00Z

1 July 2026 — monthly data refresh · Automated rebuild

The first monthly rebuild with the repaired pipeline read healthy life expectancy for every upper-tier and single-tier council from the ONS release of 19 February 2026, covering 2022–2024. English councils had previously used OHID figures for 2021–2023; Lifemap’s previous figures for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland were for 2016–2018. England’s figures for weight, physical activity and five a day moved to the 2024/25 survey year.

Automated rebuilds in May and June produced empty lifestyle columns; the live site was not affected

2026-06-05T00:00:00Z

5 June 2026 — pipeline repair · Dataset restored · pipeline fixed

The monthly rebuilds of 1 May and 1 June wrote a dataset with no lifestyle figures, because the OHID Fingertips service began rejecting a request format the pipeline used. Those files were never deployed: the live site kept serving the April data. The dataset was restored, the request fixed, and the pipeline now refuses to write a file whose coverage has fallen and never replaces a published value with a blank. The pipeline also switched its healthy life expectancy source to the new ONS all-ages release.

NI lifestyle data now surfaces via HSC Trust adjacency

2026-04-26T00:00:00Z

26 April 2026 — Northern Ireland · Live on production

The 11 Northern Ireland LGD records had null lifestyle fields since launch. Adult lifestyle prevalence is published only at HSC Trust level (5 trusts), never at LGD2014 council level — per-LGD samples are too small. Confirmed against HSNI, NISRA Continuous Household Survey, Sport NI, HSCIMS, Census 2021 and APS that no UK statistical body publishes at LGD level.

The frontend now surfaces the parent HSC Trust’s five-indicator block on every NI LGD result panel and area page, with explicit “These belong to the HSC Trust, not [LGD name]” framing. Same editorial principle as the English district → county adjacency: parent values are never copied into the child record.

Trust-level data sourced from HSNI 2024/25 Trend Tables

Smoking, obesity, physical activity, 5-a-day: 2023/24 period.
Higher-risk drinking: 2022/23 period (question not asked in 2023/24).
Two LGDs straddle Trust boundaries: Mid Ulster (Northern + Southern) and Newry, Mourne and Down (South Eastern + Southern). Both Trust figures are surfaced for these two with a footnote.

Definition note. HSNI obesity uses BMI ≥ 30 (matches Scotland; narrower than England’s BMI ≥ 25). The other four indicators (smoking, drinking >14 u/wk, activity 150 min/wk MVPA, 5-a-day) use definitions matching England’s Fingertips and Wales’s NSW. Disclosed.

Welsh data refreshed, definitions harmonised

2026-04-26T00:00:00Z

26 April 2026 — Wales freshness · Live on production

Welsh lifestyle data refreshed from Welsh Health Survey 2014–15 (11 years old) to National Survey for Wales 2019–20 (6 years old) for all 22 Welsh principal areas. The two definition mismatches that have been flagging Welsh values for months — pre-2016 daily-units drinking and 5×30 min/wk physical activity — both close in this refresh.

What changed

Higher-risk drinking — Welsh column now uses >14 u/wk above-guideline (matches Fingertips 92778 and SHeS “Hazardous/Harmful drinker”).
Physical activity — Welsh column now uses 150 min/wk MVPA (matches Fingertips 93014 and UK CMO).
Obesity — Welsh column now uses BMI ≥ 25 “overweight or obese” (matches Fingertips 93088); Scotland still uses BMI ≥ 30, disclosed.
Smoking and 5-a-day — values refreshed; definitions already matched.
Source: StatsWales hlth5002 via the 14 Sep 2025 Wayback snapshot. Live URL retired in the 2025 stats.gov.wales migration.

What this fixes editorially. Cross-country comparability is now end-to-end for drinking (Eng+Wales+Scot all >14 u/wk), physical activity (Eng+Wales+Scot all 150 min/wk MVPA), and obesity (Eng+Wales BMI ≥ 25, Scotland BMI ≥ 30 still). A reporter writing about Welsh public health can now sit Welsh values next to English values without a definition footnote.

District-level data, Scotland refresh, schema cleanup

2026-04-26T00:00:00Z

26 April 2026 — accuracy uplift · Live on production · build 0ac4e49 + e221ffd

The single biggest accuracy improvement since launch. Coverage on the four LTLA-publishing lifestyle indicators (smoking, obesity, physical activity, 5-a-day) jumped from 40 % to 97 % by adding a parallel Fingertips fetch at lower-tier-authority level. Scotland was refreshed end-to-end via the Scottish Government’s council-area Shiny dashboard. The dataset shape was tightened: non-council records dropped, country totals moved to a sibling block.

Coverage end state

Indicator	Before	After
Life expectancy	100 %	100 %
Healthy life expectancy	49 %	56 % · plus parent-county adjacency for English districts
Smoking	44 %	97 %
Obesity	44 %	97 %
Physical activity	40 %	97 %
5-a-day	40 %	97 %
Higher-risk drinking	40 %	54 % · UTLA-only by upstream design, parent-county adjacency for English districts

What changed

164 English districts (E07) now carry their own Fingertips lifestyle figures rather than null. Canterbury shows Canterbury, not Kent.
32 Scottish councils refreshed across smoking (SSCQ 2023) + obesity / drinking / physical activity (SHeS 2019–2023, scraped via headless Camoufox) + 5-a-day (SHeS 2016–2019, the most recent council-area period).
91 non-council records dropped — NHS Integrated Care Boards, combined authorities, regions, and devolved-nation NHS health boards. None were ever returned by postcodes.io and none rendered. Country aggregates moved to _meta.country_totals.
Definitions harmonised across England / Scotland / Wales for drinking (>14 units/wk) and physical activity (CMO 150 min/wk MVPA). Obesity remains BMI ≥ 25 in England Fingertips vs BMI ≥ 30 elsewhere — disclosed wherever shown.
Pipeline updated — build_dataset.py now performs dual UTLA + LTLA Fingertips fetches plus an ONS LAD→CTY lookup, so future rebuilds preserve the backfill.
Frontend — new county-adjacency block on postcode result panel for English districts. Strict editorial principle: parent-county values are NEVER copied into a district row in the data file. Inheritance is UI-only with explicit “belongs to Kent, not Canterbury” framing.
New pages — /methodology/, /glossary/, /changelog/, plus per-area landing pages at /area/ (380 indexable URLs).

Editorial principle (load-bearing). A Canterbury row that contained Kent’s drinking figure would be the screenshot trap that breaks journalist trust — same number, but published as the county’s, and a careful reader notices. We avoid this by keeping inheritance strictly UI-side. The data file stays clean.

HLE backfill, deprivation lens, sources page

2026-04-25T00:00:00Z

25 April 2026 — v0.3.0 launch · Live on production · lifemap.org.uk goes public

Lifemap goes public at lifemap.org.uk. Major data backfills bring HLE coverage to 49 %; nine post-2019 English UTLAs (Cumberland, Westmorland & Furness, post-2023 North Yorkshire and Somerset, Buckinghamshire, North and West Northamptonshire, Barnsley, Sheffield) are added via Fingertips indicator 90362 (2021–2023). A new deprivation lens on the homepage uses ONS’s 15 April 2026 release; a public /sources/ page audits every external URL.

Highlights

HLE source switched for English UTLAs from ONS HSLE 2016–2018 (frozen) to OHID Fingertips 90362 (2021–2023). Welsh, Scottish and NI UTLAs continue on the older series until newer LA-level data is published.
Higher-risk drinking switched from indicator 94185 (Government Office Region only) to 92778 (above-guideline, UTLA-level). Coverage jumped from 8 % to 40 %.
Choropleth boundaries updated from 2022 to December 2024 ONS UTLA boundaries; map.js performs slug-fallback joins for the 2024 South Yorkshire renumbering.
Story page, press kit, deprivation chart, brand mark, mobile padding, embed widget, OG images all shipped.