The College of Podiatry’s response to the Ministerial announcement that Public Health England will be replaced with the National Institute for Health Protection

On the 18th August the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Matt Hancock, announced that Public Health England (PHE) will be disbanded as an arm’s length body of the Department of Health and Social Care and will be replaced with the National Institute for Health Protection (NIHP). The reasoning given, to the Sunday Telegraph three days before the announcement, was that PHE did not effectively handle the outbreak of the pandemic. PHE is an executive agency directly accountable to the Secretary of State for Health. CEO of PHE, Duncan Selbie, said that never at any stage was it PHE’s role to set the national testing strategy for the coronavirus pandemic; this responsibility lay with the Department of Health.

PHE, whilst heavily involved in responding to pandemic outbreaks, also lead on national programmes addressing substance misuse, cervical screening, environmental health, cardiovascular disease prevention, tuberculosis management, measles, sexual health, smoking cessation, obesity prevention, amputation prevention, falls prevention, MSK, physical activity, and so many other pieces of work the College have been involved in such as the UK AHP Public Health Framework, All Our Health Campaign, the Cardiovascular System Leadership Forum to name but a few examples.

These many programmes have helped increase people’s life spans and improved people’s quality of life. Access to some of these important areas was limited during the peak of COVID-19, so it is even more important that they are prioritised now to keep the public healthy and prevent serious future health impacts. The government recently announced a campaign lead by the Prime Minister to tackle obesity, will such national campaigns have any impact without PHE leading them.

Whether or not there were shortfalls within PHE, surely now is not the time to disband such a vital body To disband PHE may create greater disparity in health outcomes amongst the four UK nations, of whom three are not planning to disband their national public health body whilst an international pandemic is still without a vaccine.

A greater concern is that it provides a clear example of how the Government view public health. During the austerity years under the Cameron/ Osbourne Government, it was announced that despite cuts to the public health budget of £850m1 front line services will not suffer. Obviously cuts to preventative services will have a direct effect on front line services.

Mr Hancock said that the NIHP will tackle… ‘external threats like biological weapons, pandemics, and of course infectious diseases of all kinds.’ And whilst praising those at PHE, local directors of public health, infection control specialists and epidemiologists for working around the clock since January, he went on to say that the NIHP will devolve power to local authorities but gave no details of budgets being ring-fenced in cash strapped local authorities or what will happen to PHE’s national programmes or staff.

PHE employs 5,500 (full-time equivalent) staff, at a time when the UK is likely to be plunged into COVID and Brexit shaped recession and national businesses are laying off thousands of staff on a daily basis, we hear that the first PHE staff knew of this was through the press.

For staff working in PHE this will obviously be an unsettling time. The College of Podiatry is a trade union as well as a professional body, and therefore together with colleagues from the other health trade unions, we will be in discussions about what this means for those affected staff.

The College would like to take this opportunity to thank the many PHE staff and associates we have worked with over the years, who are too many to name, but we wish to give special thanks to AHP Lead Linda Hindle, National Lead for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention, Prof. Jamie Waterall, and National Lead for Older Adults and MSK Health Nuzhat Ali. 

1 https://www.ippr.org/blog/public-health-cuts#anounce-of-prevention-is-worth-a-pound-of-cure