After being asked by then Secretary of State for Health to chair an independent review, Sir Micharl Marmot’s released his report, Fair Society, Healthy Lives (2010). Marmot argued that reducing health inequalities requires action to reduce socioeconomic and other inequalities, or the other ‘non-medical’ factors that can influence our health and wellbeing, such as social, political and cultural conditions – where we live and work, our education and learning, who we meet and connect with, how we spend our free time.

We know that, in order to tackle these widening and persistent health inequalities, a radical shift is needed.

A second report released by Marmot, Health Equity in England: The Marmot Review 10 Years On (2020), showed that life expectancy had failed to increase for the first time in 100 years across the country. It also reported that:

• people can expect to spend more of their lives in poor health
• improvements to life expectancy have stalled, and declined for women in the most deprived 10% of areas
• the health gap has grown between wealthy and deprived areas
• place matters – living in a deprived area of the Northeast is worse for your health than living in a similarly deprived area in London, to the extent that life expectancy is nearly five years less.

We recognise how these influential social factors – the social determinants of health as coined by Marmot – such as access to healthcare, education, income and environment, can be to determining a person’s health. Across all our work we endeavour to influence and improve the wider determinants of healthy by working with communities to identify and address the barriers, conditions or contexts which undermine good health and wellbeing. Through our Active Citizenship approach, we are guided by Marmot’s reports, findings and framework to work to listen, understand, build trust and help to tackle the challenges people are experiencing to improve wellbeing through a range of interventions.