Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, whether his Department has plans to make an assessment of the potential effect of reductions in funding for local government on regional health disparities, including life expectancy.

The Government carefully considers how its policies will affect communities across the country. For example, each year, we conduct an assessment of the equality impacts of the annual Local Government Finance Settlement and publish a statement on the Gov UK website. As the equality statement makes clear, this year the Government made available an increase in overall Core Spending Power of 4.6% in cash terms and ensured that no local authority saw a reduction in Core Spending Power compared to 2020-21, which benefitted all those with protected characteristics. These increases build on the largest year-on-year increase in spending power in a decade in 2020-21.

Reducing health inequalities will also be a core aim of the new Office of Health Promotion (OHP). The OHP will systematically tackle the top preventable risk factors, improving the public's health and narrowing health inequalities. It will set health improvement priorities for government, and will work with the whole of government, the NHS, local government, industry and wider partners to deliver on these priorities.