Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps his Department is taking to help reduce avoidable deaths in people below 70 years of age.

Reducing avoidable deaths and helping people to live better for longer are key priorities for the health and care system. Programmes focusing specifically on these challenges include the following:

- investing up to £300 million a year by 2020 to improve earlier cancer diagnosis;

- providing screening programmes to identify disease earlier;

- running campaigns, such as the Be Clear on Cancer campaigns, to raise awareness and encourage people with symptoms to seek diagnosis earlier;

- rolling out our risk identification and management programmes, such as the NHS Health Check and the NHS Diabetes Prevention Programmes;

- introducing a range of tobacco control legislation, including: the standardised packaging of tobacco products, in order to discourage young people from starting smoking; helping adult smokers to quit; and a commitment to a new tobacco control plan in 2016 to continue to drive down smoking rates; and

- tackling other lifestyle factors such as helping people to drink more moderately, eat healthily and take more exercise.

Local authorities have lead responsibility for improving the health of their local populations and this responsibility is supported by over £16 billion of funding over the spending review period. This is in addition to what the National Health Service spends on prevention, including through national immunisation and screening programmes.