Better Health For All

We’re calling for the UK Government to invest in a Prevention Transformation Fund to support the upgrading of prevention and early intervention activity in local authorities in England in next year’s Comprehensive Spending Review. (This is the Treasury-led process to allocate resources across all government departments.)

The recognition that local authorities have a much greater influence on the wider determinants of health was the reason for the transfer of public health from the NHS to local authorities in 2013, and we were pleased to see local authorities again acknowledged as “leaders in local health improvement” in the Department of Health & Social Care’s (DHSC)’s recently published vision for prevention.

The vision recognises that the enormous potential of councils to improve the health and wellbeing of their residents rests largely on their ability to “tailor public health services to local need, to support economic growth, and to influence the wider determinants of health through policies on housing, leisure and other services”.

However, in recent years, local authorities’ ability to do just this has been severely curtailed by extensive cuts to the public health grant and wider council budgets. Most authorities have just about coped with budget cuts while maintaining a high level of standards, but our members working in local public health teams have told us they have reached the absolute limit of the savings they can make without adversely impacting the wellbeing of their residents.

Local authorities have enormous potential to improve the health and wellbeing of their residents, but to achieve it, they need both the funding and the freedom to do exactly what is asked of them: tailoring services, developing new and innovative ways of working and of engaging with their communities in order to best meet local needs.

We believe a dedicated Prevention Transformation Fund, separate from and in addition to the ring-fenced grant, would give local authorities back the ability and freedom to do just this. Our recently published discussion paper, developed following extensive consultation with our members and other stakeholders, outlines why we believe a Prevention Transformation Fund is the right approach, as well as initial ideas about how large the fund should be, what it should pay for and where the money for it could come from.

The ultimate aim of this work is to change national policy to benefit the health of the public and, in doing so, we want it to reflect your voices. We’re very keen to continue to get feedback on the paper from our members and other stakeholders, including answers to the following questions:

1. What should the high-level objectives of the fund be?
2. What conditions should be attached to the fund?
3. What should we expect to get from this investment and in what timeframe?
4. What are the accountability arrangements?
5. What would the likely consequences be if we didn’t invest in prevention transformation?

We will be publishing a revised version of the discussion paper next month, including answers to the questions posed above, so please do have a read and send your comments to policy@fph.org.uk.

This is your campaign and your chance to influence national policy, so please get involved and help us make local government public health the national priority it deserves to be.

Written by Andrew Turner, Specialty Registrar in Public Health and member of FPH’s Public Health Funding Project Group.