Dr Max Davie, Officer for Health Improvement, Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH), said:
If the Government is to truly level up the country it must act to tackle the causes of poverty and reduce variation in health outcomes to ensure all children have the best start to life, wherever they are. It is positive that the Government’s levelling up policy programme recognises the need to address inequalities in health outcomes, however child health must be embedded as a central pillar.
The announcement of a new White Paper on Health Disparities focused on prevention and disparities by ethnicity, socioeconomics and geography is extremely important. However, inequalities in health outcomes are widening between children living in more deprived areas compared to their peers living in less deprived areas. Therefore, this paper must include an explicit focus, with national targets, on reducing child poverty and child health inequalities and the white paper must be published without delay.
It remains a concern that the Government have failed to increase public health funding to Local Authorities. The poorest Local Authority areas have seen the biggest proportional cuts to their public health grant allocation since 2015. If the Government is serious about levelling up, they must urgently increase public health funding to Local Authorities commensurate to local population need.
The commitments made in the Levelling Up White Paper cannot be looked at in isolation. We will continue to call on Government to put child health at the heart of all its policies, across all departments.