THE YORKSHIRE PARTY has criticised the Government for cutting the budget for supporting healthy lifestyles, claiming it will lead to greater health problems and damage ‘levelling-up’.
Yorkshire Party leader, Bob Buxton, said: “It’s a false economy, borne of a false promise to level-up. It will lead to greater health problems in future, shorter lifespan, societal problems and end up costing the NHS and wider economy far more than it will save. It’s the Tories at their worst.”
Funding for supporting a healthy lifestyle, including tackling obesity and smoking, has been cut by around a quarter in six years, falling from £4.3bn in 2015-16 to £3.3bn this year, according to statistics released this week.
Dr Buxton said: “Decades of underfunding in Yorkshire and the whole North has left our communities behind and more in need of this sort of health funding than London and the southeast. This cut is the latest proof that ‘levelling-up’ was just an election-day promise; easily made, quickly forgotten.”
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