One reason for life expectancy worsening is cutbacks to public health - Yorkshire Post Letters

Your excellent report about researchers finding that Covid-19 hit people in the north worse than those in the South comes as no surprise.

It is part of a pattern of higher death rates from all causes in more deprived areas, particularly former industrial towns in the North of England.

Even without Covid's effects more people than expected are dying from other causes than should be expected for their age group.

Across Britain life expectancy is inversely correlated to deprivation.Places like Middlesbrough have appalling rates of heart disease, despite a world class heart unit at the James Cook Hospital.

In England and Wales mortality rates among 30-49 year olds have actually increased since 2012. Yet in countries of supposedly similar wealth like France and the Netherlands those mortality rates have fallen.

One reason for the high death rates and worsening of life expectancy is cutbacks to public health. Around 40 per cent of the workload on the NHS would be avoided with more investment in primary prevention, the work done as public health, yet Public Health Grant paid to local authorities by the Department of Health was cut by a shocking 24 per cent in real terms per person during the years 2015-16 and 2021-22. Other funding for local authorities was cut at the same time.

So while Conservative Ministers talked of ‘levelling up’ there was a steady erosion of people's health and well-being through illness and early death.

Isn't this the real scandal that people should be concerned about, not whether a TV presenter was entitled to express his views nor whether Britain should start another likely to fail policy to deter asylum seekers?