| Andrew Lansley forced to make U-turn on public health campaign cut The health secretary, Andrew Lansley, has been forced into a major U-turn on funding for public health campaigns, after evidence emerged that the spending freeze had cost lives. An extra £15m has now been set aside for promoting the government's anti-smoking website and £14m will be made available for a campaign promoting healthy living. The decision has come in response to a damning Department of Health (DoH) report on the consequences of the government's decision to "all but cease" publicly-funded advertising last year. The DoH found that the number of people ringing the drug abuse support helpline, Frank, had fallen by 22%, that visits to the Smokefree website had fallen by 50% and that the number of people joining the government's lifestyle website was down by two-thirds. Most worryingly, the report said, there was evidence that "the cessation of marketing activity [had] resulted in declining quit attempts, and subsequent loss of life from smoking-related illness". It added: "Following the coalition government's freeze on non-essential marketing expenditure, all social marketing programmes were reduced and expenditure on advertising all but ceased. "We have now had the opportunity to learn from the freeze and to assess where the loss of mass communications had a negative impact... We now recommend that some advertising, and other forms of mass communication such as sponsorship, paid media partnerships and PR, be resumed." Shadow health secretary John Healey said Lansley needed to publicly apologise for his mistakes: "Mass publicity must play a part in good public health. This report shows that Andrew Lansley made the wrong judgment in axing anti-smoking promotions, just like he did on the flu-jab adverts last autumn. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/may/28/andrew-lansley-u-turn-public-health-cuts |
|
