Last Tuesday 18th May, we joined the ‘Inclusive economies and fairer futures: How to build back better’ webinar, hosted by the LGA and chaired by Cllr Colin Noble (Member of the LGA Community Wellbeing Board and Suffolk County Council Councillor). Ian Peters, the Chair of the UK Health Security Agency was speaking, alongside Jo Bibby from The Health Foundation, Judith Kurth, Scott Anderson, Alan Higgins and Paul Johnstone from Public Health England, Michael Wood from NHS Confederation and our Managing Director, Ben Lucas.
The webinar brought together the different viewpoints of people and organisations working on the inclusive economies agenda to share their experiences, consider how their work overlaps and look forwards to future collaboration. Over 300 delegates attended, including representatives from local government public health and policy departments, the NHS, Public Health England and national government. This webinar was a call to action, inviting speakers and attendees to join a national network, moving to practical action, and sharing best practice and lessons learned.
There has never been a more important time to act. The Covid-19 pandemic has served as a stark reminder of the relationship between health and wealth. A public health crisis on this scale is inevitably an economic crisis too. But we know from the 1980s, and before that the 1930s, that the same is true the other way around. Market driven economic recessions can have very severe long-term health effects.
At the place level, the crisis has shone a very intense spotlight on the relationship between health and economic vulnerability. Those places with the highest Covid-19 case rates tend to be more deprived and have also been most impacted by the economic fallout of the crisis. Our analysis has shown that the places least resilient to economic shock have weak labour markets with low skills levels, earnings and poor health outcomes.
Recovery and levelling up is an opportunity to create more inclusive, sustainable and resilient economies and communities through integrated approaches to health and wealth. We have been working on these issues in our work with Key Cities and Core Cities on the future of urban centres, London Councils on economic recovery, Public Health England and Lancashire on health and wealth, and on Levelling up the Lifecycle.
Here are five ways to make this happen:
1. Put health at the heart of economic recovery and levelling up – integrate public service reform and economic recovery into one overall strategy to build healthy, inclusive and resilient economies and communities.
2. Establish a clear role for local government in system leadership on health improvement – supported by a new duty to improve public health. This is a strategic enabling role, which would complement the delivery role of local government.
3. Invest in prevention and account for it – shift funding towards preventative investment through multi-year outcome agreements, which enable authorities to reprofile expenditure and spend more up front. Investments and interventions should be guided by prevention and health improvement plans, underpinned by a strong evidence base around their place-specific challenges and opportunities.
4. Embed inclusive growth principles in capital projects and establish greater funding parity between investment in social and physical infrastructure – places should have the flexibility to design capital projects in a way that achieves social, public health, inclusive and sustainable outcomes by linking deprived communities and target cohorts with opportunities and investments. And they should be able to fund social infrastructure, people and community facing projects on the same scale.
5. Extend devolution to health and social policy – public health and social policy should be central to any potential future phases of devolution so that places can better integrate public service reform and economic renewal at scale.