Health inequalities: What can we learn from Manchester’s approach?
Making lives better when times are hard can seem an insurmountable challenge. But local initiatives with joined-up working can have an impact, reports Emma Wilkinson Children born in 2008 in the UK have not yet hit their 18th birthday but have already lived through a global financial crisis, a period of austerity, a pandemic, and now a cost-of-living crisis. Inequality has widened in that time, and local authority budgets have been dramatically cut. Before last year’s election the Labour Party set out its health mission, where it acknowledged that much of what made people healthy sat outside the remit of the NHS. It set out plans for jobs, housing, and policies around unhealthy food, alcohol, and tobacco.1 But with a laser focus on fiscal policy, many public health experts believe that the government is simply not being ambitious enough. Since gaining power the Labour government has announced a ban later this year on TV advertising of unhealthy food before the 9 pm watershed,2 as well
