MARK Harper is an ambitious career MP and so understandably eager to back the Government's planned increase in retirement age in a bid to save the money needed to pay bankers' bonuses (see his column in The Forester last week). But he is too ready to parrot headlines that bear little resemblance to reality, conveniently forgetting the maxim that there are lies, damn lies and statistics.

He regurgitates the Department of Work and Pension's scare headline that 10 million people in Britain will be over 100 – but let us look at the figures in more detail.

The DWP predicts that "by 2080, there could be 626,900 people in the UK aged 100 or more" . Hardly 10 million!

But even this figure is suspect. The DWP, no doubt under some pressure from ministers, has taken an exponential projection from the past few years and made the assumption that the growth in centenarians will continue at the same rate for ever (this is where the 10 million figure comes from).

But a little thought will show that this is highly unlikely.

The growth in the number of centenarians happened because of steadily improving diet and healthcare over their lifetimes, allowing those people who had a favourable genetic make-up, who did not smoke, drank little or no alcohol and were not overweight, to reach 100. Previously, such people were not able to realise their genetic inheritance due to disease and poor diet.

But recent reports have shown that obesity, lack of exercise, the rising epidemic of diabetes and the over-use of alcohol are big problems in Britain, while smoking is on the increase among young women.

Put this together with scientific evidence that there are a finite number of people who have the genetic make-up to reach 100, whatever their diet or life-style, then it is possible that the present generation of young people will be the first in a hundred years to live less long than their parents.

While the DWP's simple extrapolation of figures might be correct, it seems very unlikely.

It is bad science, and certainly not something you would want to base policy on – unless of course you were not interested in the truth but only interested in promoting the Coalition's cut-at-all-costs political dogma.

John French

Brockweir