Public Health (England)

Part of Points of Order – in the House of Commons at 2:41 pm on 22 February 2007.

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Photo of Caroline Flint Caroline Flint Minister of State (Department of Health) (Public Health) 2:41, 22 February 2007

As I said, the Mediterranean diet that people have in certain parts of Europe, which is probably considerably healthier on the whole than the usual diet in our country, has perhaps protected people in many ways. We live in a society in which car use is perhaps greater than in others and in which some of the more physical jobs no longer exist—there is no reason to go back to those jobs because some of them were associated with health problems.

We are not on our own in having the problem either in Europe, or worldwide. When I attended the World Health Organisation Europe conference on obesity in Istanbul last year, I was reassured by how many countries were looking to us because we were ahead of them on trying to tackle the problem. Today, I have made it clear that the Government must arm the ordinary citizen to better look after their own health; to empower the parent to better maintain their child's health; and to complement this with the services, often community based, to help people overcome barriers to good health. That gives people individual responsibility, but with the Government on their side.

There is no complacency from the Government about the challenges ahead and the cultural change that will be involved. New approaches to public health require a reformed NHS, with new partners and new ways of working—reforms that place more services in the community, closer to home, and reforms that improve transparency, such as providing insight into the pattern of services provided by GPs.

The new emphasis on public health is a policy direction whose time has come. The smoking ban has been widely welcomed; food labelling is now widely accepted; reducing salt, sugar and fat in food is not contested; five-a-day is part of the conversation with consumers; and building exercise into daily routines is regarded as common sense. All that illustrates that public health messages are becoming part of the nation's vocabulary.

Public health is the forward looking, preventive face of the NHS, and Britain today is among the world leaders, treating people as individuals, meeting complex needs, addressing personal choices and tackling real inequalities. Public health will continue to be central to the work of a reformed, smarter, 21st-century health service. Public health demonstrates the Government's ambitions for the nation's health, ambitions shared by the British people. Only by working together can we make the difference, and that is what we will continue to do.