Food campaigners have long been exasperated by the short-sightedness of cutting funding for healthy eating projects, when these projects help avert chronic illness and thus in the longer term save money.
Now MPs on the parliamentary Health Committee, which monitors the activities of the Department for Health, have come to the same conclusion. Their report on the NHS's spending plans has found that shifting funding away from public health and health education will make it difficult for the NHS to meet its own targets for public health improvement, which it laid out last year in a document called the Five Year Forward View.
The committee's report, available here, says: "The cuts to public health budgets set out in the Spending Review threaten to undermine the necessary upgrade to prevention and public health set out in the Five Year Forward View. We believe that cutting public health is a false economy, creating avoidable additional costs in the future." This had been the 'overwhelming view' among the witnesses who gave evidence to the committee.
On the related question of social care, the committee concluded that cuts to funding had now gone as far as possible, with the result that "increasing numbers of people with genuine social care needs are no longer receiving the care they need because of a lack of resources".
Sustain: Sustain The alliance for better food and farming advocates food and agriculture policies and practices that enhance the health and welfare of people and animals, improve the working and living environment, enrich society and culture and promote equity.
