Ministers should work with councils on public health

摘要

In any analysis of health trends over the past 20 years two stark statistics stand out; smoking-related diseases like lung cancer and heart attacks are down but diabetes is up and the latter is primarily due to obesity.Despite the NHS struggling to cope with this trend in long-term illness which costs it £6bn, the Government continues to drag its feet on dealing with what is a public health crisis. Having for example transferred public health responsibility from the NHS to local government in 2013 ministers have since slashed the public health budget by £600m between 2015/16 to 2019/20. Clearly they do not value local government's role. The trouble is ministers have come up with little alternative. After much kicking and screaming the Government this year finally introduced a sugar tax but we await further action on salt and saturated fat content and more rigorous guidelines on packaging labels and advertising.