The leading global expert on health inequalities and Director of the UCL Institute of Health Equity (IHE), Professor Sir Michael Marmot, has written a damning letter to party leaders and MPs across the country after a new UCL IHE 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.
