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Evidence and consultations

The King’s Fund response to the Mayor of London’s draft health inequalities strategy

The King’s Fund is an independent health charity whose Royal Charter stipulates our work should include the promotion of health and alleviation of sickness, to confer benefit, whether directly or indirectly, for the health of Londoners. We interpret this broadly, and our national work has relevance to London, but we also undertake work and seek to influence in ways issues that will directly benefit Londoners’ health. As such we welcome the Mayor’s consultation on his future health inequalities strategy and the opportunity to comment.

Here we set out our response to the consultation. We group the 11 points into four linked reflections on: the scope and focus of the strategy; the Mayor’s role versus that of others; accountability; and finally views on specific proposals.

Our overall view is that the strategy needs to follow both a broad approach (reflecting the complex causes and solutions to health inequalities) and a tightly focused one (narrowing down on interventions that have inequality reduction as their core aim). The draft strategy ticks the box on the first, but doesn’t sufficiently do so on the second. In sum, this is a good start, but we believe as the strategy is finalised its commitments need to be more tightly focused on inequality reduction than they currently are.

Update: In our response we stated that we had not seen the Integrated Impact Assessment of the draft strategy. This is available here.