{"id":2218,"date":"2024-02-14T11:13:40","date_gmt":"2024-02-14T11:13:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/?p=2218"},"modified":"2024-07-16T19:55:06","modified_gmt":"2024-07-16T18:55:06","slug":"labour-scaling-back-its-28-billion-green-pledge-will-impact-uk-housing-and-public-health","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/2024\/02\/14\/labour-scaling-back-its-28-billion-green-pledge-will-impact-uk-housing-and-public-health\/","title":{"rendered":"Labour scaling back its \u00a328 billion green pledge will impact UK housing \u2013 and public health"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr Geoff Bates<\/a> is a Lecturer at the University of Bath Institute for Policy Research (IPR). Dr Jack Newman<\/a> is a Research Fellow at the School for Policy Studies at University of Bristol. This article was originally published by The Conversation<\/a> on 13 February 2024.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

The UK Labour party has announced<\/a> its intention to reduce its \u00a328 billion green investment pledge<\/a> to less than \u00a315 billion if elected this year. The political fallout has been been largely focused on the party\u2019s fiscal credibility and leader of the opposition Keir Starmer\u2019s seeming proclivity for U-turns<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A crucial question so far overlooked is what impact the cut would have on public health<\/a>. The initial pledge included a key home-insulation plan to upgrade 72% \u2013 19m homes \u2013 of the UK\u2019s housing stock.<\/p>\n

The revised plan, however, replaces that ambitious target with the more ambiguous statement that \u201cmillions of homes\u201d will be refurbished. Research<\/a> has long shown that uninsulated homes have consequences for health, especially for those living in poverty and in poor quality housing. This in turn places an extra burden<\/a> on an already over-stretched health service.<\/p>\n

Existing government failure<\/h2>\n

The wider societal cost of poor-quality housing in the UK is estimated at \u00a318.6 billion a year<\/a>. Such costs, however, are often ignored when housing policy is being developed and implemented.<\/p>\n

\n

Labour promises to deliver 1.5 million homes by \u201cblitzing<\/a>\u201d the planning system, but it has so far ignored the potential consequences for public health.<\/p>\n

Of course, the failure to factor in health is by no means unique to Labour policy. It is already embedded in the government\u2019s approach. A recent academic review<\/a> of government housing and transport policy found that health is notably absent, despite well-established evidence that urban spaces are making us ill. This shows that on the occasions where health is included, it is lower in a hierarchy of priorities compared to other agendas such as growing the economy.<\/p>\n

For many years, government housing policy has been shaped by the numeric gap between supply and demand, rather than the type or quality of the housing stock. The mechanisms for delivering have been based on land release and planning reform. Successive housing policies have mentioned involving communities and supporting their health, social, and cultural wellbeing. But there have been no clear targets for ensuring house retrofit and house building positively impact public health.<\/p>\n

In his 2010 independent review on how to reduce health inequalities in England, epidemiologist Michael Marmot showed<\/a> that prioritising health in urban policies, like housing and transport, can have significant health benefits for local populations.<\/p>\n

Our research project has shown<\/a> that health should be made a central factor in all national policy and guidance that shapes urban spaces. The World Health Organization recommends<\/a>explicitly including health in housing policy \u2013 and tracking its impact with recognised metrics. UK politicians have largely failed to respond.<\/p>\n

Promising developments<\/h2>\n

In addition to positive developments in government, such as the Build Back Beautiful Commission<\/a>, the opposition also has some promising ambitions. Labour is pledging to deliver a \u201cprevention-first revolution\u201d<\/a>, in which it envisions a pro-active role for government in ensuring that everybody has the building blocks for a healthy life.<\/p>\n

In its mission document for health policy, Labour says that retrofitting of millions of homes will \u201ckeep families warm rather than living in damp, mouldy conditions that give their children asthma\u201d. The fact that the party is making explicit this link between housing and health signal is a potentially very positive step forward.<\/p>\n

However, in all the furore about Labour scrapping its \u00a328 billion pledge, this crucial link to public health has been entirely forgotten. Indeed, while Labour\u2019s environmental policy has been carefully updated to revise and remove various targets, the preventative health agenda retains the now defunct promise to \u201coversee retrofitting of 19 million homes<\/a>\u201d. This is perhaps indicative of the extent to which policymakers just don\u2019t think about health when they think about housing.<\/p>\n

While the Conservative pledges for the next parliament remain unclear, analysis of their existing policies in government has found<\/a> a failure to think about or measure the way housing and urban development policis impact health. Instead, it is merely assumed that housing policies will have positive health outcomes. Rather than making such assumptions, policymakers should be putting public health considerations at the centre of all their decision making.<\/p>\n

To ensure that the impact any given policy has on public health is measured<\/a> and acted upon<\/a>, health needs to be an explicit urban planning policy outcome. It needs to be clearly defined, measurable, and built into policy implementation and political discourse.<\/p>\n

It is also important that different government ministries and relevant stakeholders focused on public health, planning and the environment work together more effectively. Unhealthy homes should be a priority for both the housing minister and the health minister.<\/p>\n

Healthier people are more economically productive. They have a smaller financial footprint on the NHS. In the long term, better preventative health is a key part of solving some of the UK\u2019s biggest economic challenges, from labour shortages and sluggish productivity growth to stretched public finances.<\/p>\n

Too often government policy is not often designed with the long-term in mind. Instead, short-term economic outcomes and political gains are prioritised<\/a> \u2013 to the detriment of public health.<\/p>\n

The best way for the government to protect public health is for every department to consider how their work impacts on it. If political and economic calculations about creating, scrapping and rescaling major projects continue to ignore health, however, politicians are likely to continue coming up with the wrong answers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

This research comes from the TRUUD project, a research programme based at the University of Bristol, that aims to reduce non-communicable disease (such as cancers, diabetes, obesity, mental ill-health and respiratory illness) and health inequalities linked to the quality of urban planning and development for use in discussions with government and the developer industry. The TRUUD research project<\/a> is funded by the UK Prevention Research Partnership<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of the IPR, nor of the University of Bath.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr Geoff Bates is a Lecturer at the University of Bath Institute for Policy Research (IPR). Dr Jack Newman is a Research Fellow at the School for Policy Studies at University of Bristol. This article was originally published by The...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1742,"featured_media":2221,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[108,118,119,123,124,145,129],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture-and-policy","category-health","category-housing","category-political-ideologies","category-public-services","category-sustainability","category-uk-politics"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/115\/2024\/02\/1A9A5AE1-3B21-4ED2-8379-8F5B62B08409.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1742"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2218\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}