FPH welcome the call from the King’s Fund and the Health Foundation for the government to act urgently to counter further cuts to the public health grant and place public health funding on a more sustainable footing for the future. Further cuts are now expected due to the likely postponement of this year’s Spending Review.
Professor Maggie Rae, President of the Faculty of Public Health said: “FPH members working in public health teams have gone to heroic lengths, in partnership with local government, to maintain and improve on current services within a climate of continually diminishing budgets. While teams have found ways to cope with these cuts –mostly through one-off recommissioning decisions – they have reached the absolute limit of the savings they can make without adverse consequences for the health of the public.
To continue to provide a high standard of services, public health teams require certainty that they will not face any additional, unplanned cuts due to the likely delay of the Spending Review. To meet the bold, prevention aspirations outlined in both the NHS Long Term Plan and the government’s Prevention Vision, public health teams also require clarity over the long term future of the public health grant and increased investment to support local service innovation.”
To support these aims, FPH has developed a proposal for a Prevention Transformation Fund for local authority public health teams worth between £1-2 billion per year, which you can read here.
We look forward to working with the government and other partners to ensure that public health teams have the funding and support they need to deliver all that is being asked of them and protect the health of the public.
