Children born today are likely to spend a larger proportion of their lives in poor health than their grandparents.

They will also benefit from substantially smaller increases in their life expectancy than those born just a few years earlier, in the first decade of the 21st century.

But new data from the Office for National Statistics has also shown that those aged 65 are seeing their healthy life expectancy increase: men in England and Wales aged 65 have gained 31.5 weeks of life, and 33.5 weeks of healthy life, since 2009. Women of the same age have gained 17.4 weeks of life and 23.3 weeks of healthy life over the same period.

In contrast, the proportion of life expected to be spent in good health in the UK has decreased between 2009-11 and 2016-18, from 79.9% to 79.5% for males and from 77.4% to 76.7% for females.

The analysis has found that generational progress on pay has been weak nationally, with those born in the late 1980s earning just 3% more at ages 26-28 than those born in the early 1970s at the same stage in life.

In stark contrast, those born in the early 1970s earned 16% more at the age of 28 than those born 15 years before them in the late 1950s.

While most regions had seen some improvement, millennials in the east midlands, south-east and London all earned less in their late 20s than the previous generation.

However, young people in the north–east have made considerable pay progress, with millennials earning 13% more at the age of 26-28 than those born 15 years earlier.

Funded by the Nuffield Foundation, the research also showed that homeownership rates have collapsed for young adults across the country, while the amount of money millennials spend on housing as a share of their income has rocketed.

Amid concern across the political spectrum over the difficulty facing young adults in getting on the housing ladder, the research showed that the proportion of 26- to 28-year-olds who owned their own home had collapsed by half since 1997.

Labour will allow councils to seize abandoned shops to give them a new lease of life as cooperatives or community centres, a policy designed to revive struggling high streets.

Jeremy Corbyn is expected to announce the shake-up on a visit to a high street in Bolton on Saturday, calling the sight of boarded-up shops a “symptom of economic decay” which is lowering living standards.

Under the Labour proposals, local authorities could offer properties which had been vacant for 12 months to startups, cooperative businesses and community projects.

The policy was prompted by a study by the Local Data Company which found more than 10% of town centre shops were empty. About 29,000 retail units are estimated to have been left empty for at least a year, according to the study, which found that the high-street vacancy rate rose last year to 11.5% and that 4.8% of vacant space on high streets had been vacant for more than two years. In shopping centres, that number rose to 5.8%.