Health and Wellbeing Refresh or Rehash?

Health and wellbeing should be front and centre when it comes to housing, work, communities our environment and transport plans if we are to create places that offer people improved choices and chances for a healthy life.

The Local Government Information Unit published ‘Putting Health into Place’ on 29 November 2018 in which it said that it is essential to help prevent ill health by planning, designing and developing high quality places.

So, let’s see where Walsall’s Conservative administration has got to with its Health and Wellbeing Board Refresh exercise? They say they have agreement among partners to have fewer priorities and that those priorities need to be ‘SMART’ and by that they say these reduced number of priorities need to be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely. They also need to be tangible and delivered within 12 months across the partnership.

This sounds positive, but does it stand up to close scrutiny? They’ve managed to whittle down the current 30+ priorities to just three. These are:

1. Reduce violence
2. Walsall on the move – Wellbeing in Walsall
3. Development of a Walsall Town Centre

Remember the Health and Wellbeing Board which is supposed to be delivering on these three priorities is a strategic body. There are six other Boards which feed into the overarching Walsall Strategic Partnership Board. At a more local level there are four Locality Partnerships which feed up into the Walsall Strategic Partnership.

There is an obvious train of thought which, having seen the three new priorities, says that what is being proposed is very Walsall centric. We did ask for clarification as to what was exactly meant by ‘Walsall on the move’ and ‘Development of a Walsall Town Centre’. We were assured that we had heard correctly and that it meant what it said. So what happens about the District Centres such as Willenhall and Darlaston? Aldridge and Brownhills and Bloxwich? Don’t they get a look in? Apparently not. In which case there are many who live out in the sticks so to speak who will feel alienated by this isolationist move.

So let’s compare Walsall’s Conservative’s version of Health and Wellbeing with what is being proposed in ‘Putting health into place’, it also has just three priorities, those being:

1. Planning and designing a healthy built environment
2. Creating innovative ways of delivering healthcare.
3. Encouraging strong and connected communities.

It then goes on further to say that these three priorities should be looked at in the light of ten principles, those being to: – Plan ahead collectively. Plan integrated Health Services which meet local need. Connect, involve, empower people and communities. Create compact neighbourhoods. Maximise active travel. Inspire and encourage healthy eating. Foster health in homes and buildings. Enable healthy play and leisure. Provide health services that help people stay well and finally create integrated health centres.

It’s a place based approach to health and wellbeing and as such it’s not new. What is new is having partners committed to an integrated approach. Local councils have a leading role to play in all of this, championing the agenda and creating the right conditions for collaborative working along with establishing a bottom up integrated approach across the Borough through trough the four Locality Boards with the Local Plan and Health and Wellbeing Strategies reinforcing each other.

Residents have better lives when they live in strong and supportive communities. Today, many communities face serious challenges of unemployment, poverty, poor housing and community relations. This is why a placed based approach that focuses not only on improving the physical nature of places but also the wellbeing of residents is critical in turning places round.

What Walsall’s Conservative administration is promoting is diametrically opposite to what is being proposed by the Local Government Association and the Kings Fund through ‘Putting Place into Health’. It is divisive in that it reduces elected member input to a select few within the controlling Conservative Group with a token opposition member reducing the rest including their own backbenchers, to a spectator role to be herded out when their votes are needed and cast aside once the deed is done.

It is divisive because it promotes Walsall Town Centre at the expense of the five District Centres. It is divisive because it turns its back on the good work that has been done to date on breathing new life into our struggling communities further driving the wedge between the have and have nots.

Any mention of initiatives which are designed to help clean up the environment by tackling the congestion which causes the pollution hot spots is met with derision as is promoting healthy streets and improvements to public transport.

Under the Conservative proposals the emphasis shifts away from communities and the voluntary sector towards the professionals within the NHS. The Chair of the Health and Wellbeing Board doesn’t even warrant a place around the all-powerful Cabinet table.

We should be promoting Health and Wellbeing, giving it the status needed to make a real difference to the life chances of the people of this Borough. We should embrace the sentiments behind ‘Putting Place into Health’. Ensuring that keeping people well is embedded in everything we do.

There needs to be that golden thread that runs from the bottom up through the four Locality Partnership Boards, into the Walsall Plan and the Black Country Core Strategy and the delivery Boards within the West Midlands Combined Authority putting health into place.