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Public Health (England)

To be fair, I have taken a good number of interventions and I will come on to that issue shortly. I have already touched on some the issues around health inequalities. I would like to draw attention to some of the issues often raised about the funding of public health. There are some, including Conservative Members, who have suggested, and continue to argue for, a strict ring-fencing of moneys for public health. I understand where they are coming from, but I think that it is misguided and short-sighted. We have moved from a situation whereby Whitehall prescribed everything from the centre to thinking much more about how to devolve resources and decision-making to the front line. That is not to say that we should not have resources at national level for the different aspects of public health, but we should be wary of the broader danger of ring-fencing, which could lead to public health being compartmentalised. It may provoke a narrowing of the public health effort. Let me provide the House with an example. Either at the last Health questions or the one before that, I was pleased to point out that Plymouth took some ““Choosing Health”” money, but also some other money relating to ““healthy communities””, which it packaged with other resources available for the regeneration of communities. Plymouth set a priority for healthier communities. When all that money was brought together, it far exceeded the ““Choosing Health”” money that was part of the formula allocation. Public health is important, and we have to have resources to make it happen. We also have to think more widely and in a more sophisticated way about how we can align different budgets to make better sense of the money that can be provided. Having produced the ““Health Profile of England””, and a profile for every local authority of the health outcomes for its community, we need to determine how we can better identify what is spent on prevention, so that accountability can be built in for the health outcomes and the money that is spent on dealing with them. In some areas, we might find that money is being spent but not delivering the outcomes that we want, while another area with less money might be adopting a different approach and forming different partnerships that might be proving more successful.