Brian Ferguson: Treasury should end its obsession with public health spending
09 June 2021
By the government’s logic, NHS preventative services should have to show they will save councils money, writes the
professor in the Department of Health Sciences at the University of York and
former chief economist of Public Health England.
When the Treasury recently emphasised its need for data to allow “effective challenge” of how public health funding is spent, the public health community rolled its eyes and thought ‘here we go again’.
In his comments to the House of Lords public services committee in April, chief secretary to the Treasury Steve Barclay also highlighted how last year the prime minister “asked Andrea Leadsom to do a review of the earlier years in order to look at whether the public health grant could be spent more effectively in certain areas”.
The local government minister has responded to accusations of political bias in the government’s prioritisation of areas for recent funding pots as being “grounded in politics and politicisation”, and revealed some of the emerging thinking on what form the UK shared prosperity fund should take.
At a Lords public services committee session yesterday, Luke Hall vehemently denied the accusation of pork barrel politics that has been levelled at the government. He and chief secretary to the Treasury Steve Barclay were grilled over what Lord Filkin (Lab) called the government’s “pretty significant communication failure” on its levelling up strategy.