Professor Sir Michael Marmot, has written a damning letter to party leaders and MPs across the country after a new report confirmed that UK government policies are cutting people’s lives short.
In a new report, England’s Widening Health Gap: Local Places Falling Behind, the IHE emphasises how the north-south health gap has increased, people’s health has deteriorated, and health inequalities have widened.
Sir Michael is imploring parliamentarians to act, if they care about their local population’s health.
In the letter, he wrote: “Put simply, Britain is a poor, sick country, getting sicker, with a few rich and healthy people; the results of a dismal failure of central government policies since 2010. Not only is health the foremost concern of your local constituents, communities and businesses, health is also an indicator of how well a nation is performing. Unfortunately, Britain is performing poorly.”
Using data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) and the National Audit Office (NAO), the IHE has looked at every local authority in England and, for each one, plotted levels of health, inequalities in health and cuts in their spending power. Local authorities fund many of the services e.g., housing, education and social care, which support or ameliorate the drivers of health inequalities.
In its new report, the IHE has provided information from 17 local authorities (see notes to editors) with statistically significant increases in inequalities in life expectancy between 2010-12 and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic*.
Sir Michael has written to the 58 MPs whose constituencies lie wholly or partially in these local authorities as well as each area’s local authority leaders.
These include six former or current cabinet ministers, including the former Prime Minister Liz Truss, the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, Secretary, Michael Gove and former Housing, Communities & Local Government Secretary, Robert Jenrick.
Sir Michael said: “It is no surprise that local authorities are struggling to make ends meet and that people are living shorter lives than they should. If you slash the services that support people then health will be harmed. Levelling up was supposed to provide badly needed funding for the most deprived areas. But it was a derisory amount and, as a result, never going to improve health.”
Since 2011 life expectancy has been increasing at a slower rate than it had during previous decades. But even the modest increase has not been uniformly enjoyed across England. People living in the north of England and women in the most deprived neighbourhoods saw a fall in their life expectancy, even before the pandemic struck.
