Health is moving up the agenda at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government with the recent publication of the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill. The new health duty for strategic authorities is a welcome recognition of the role local leaders can play in shaping health. They will now need to consider how they impact on health and health inequalities across ‘any of their functions'.
A wave of new powers supporting the Government's ambition to deliver economic growth includes a requirement for Mayors to produce and publish local growth plans. There are inextricable links between growth and health. Being in poor health is a growing barrier to economic participation and is shortening lives prematurely. In local authority areas with the highest rates of premature deaths, people are almost twice as likely to die before they are 75 than in areas with the lowest rates. There are clear links between ill health and stalling growth. Education, occupation and deprivation levels are behind most of the variation in avoidable premature deaths.
