Health starts here: aligning the NHS 10-year Plan with environmental health

Summary

CIEH welcomes the publication of the NHS 10-Year Plan, which places renewed emphasis on prevention, neighbourhood-based care, and tackling health inequalities. These ambitions speak directly to the work of our members, many of whom work within local authorities, and echo the importance of embedding prevention within public health, something environmental health professionals are already delivering on the ground.

Environmental Health Practitioners (EHPs) are a crucial part of this public health workforce. To realise the NHS’s vision, the Government must recognise and support the role of EHPs in creating healthier homes, communities, and environments.

We call on policymakers to ensure that environmental health is embedded in prevention strategies and recognised in neighbourhood health service design.

Key points

• The Plan’s shift “from sickness to prevention” reflects our core mission: to address the root causes of ill health before they escalate into more serious clinical conditions.
• A commitment to neighbourhood health centres and community care aligns with the role of EHPs in local authorities, tackling issues like housing quality, air pollution, food safety, and workplace health.
• Prevention cannot be achieved without addressing the wider determinants of health, including safe housing, clean air, and accessible public services, areas where environmental health professionals play a frontline role.
• The Plan’s new partnerships across local government, health systems, and civil society create an opportunity to formally embed environmental health expertise in Integrated Care Systems.

Background

The NHS 10-Year Plan sets out three transformative shifts: from hospital to community, from analogue to digital, and from sickness to prevention. These reforms are grounded in the need to reverse growing health inequalities, reduce long-term pressures on acute services, and improve public health outcomes at population level.

Environmental health has always been prevention focused. Our members are already working within local authority teams and the wider public health workforce to address many of the challenges identified in the Plan, such as poor housing, food insecurity, obesity, and poor air quality.

The Plan’s ambitions to double Personal Health Budgets, boost school-based mental health support, expand screening and vaccinations, and tackle lifestyle-related illness (e.g. smoking, vaping, poor diet) require cross-sector collaboration. Without local environmental health input, these initiatives risk being disconnected from the practical, place-based interventions that will overall determine success.

We welcome the Government's commitment to empower local systems and communities. However, this must be matched with clear mechanisms to involve environmental health practitioners in local prevention planning and delivery. Doing so will help create healthier, more resilient communities and deliver the cost savings and efficiency gains the NHS urgently needs by preventing illness before it occurs.

Our position

We urge policymakers to:

• Recognise environmental health as an essential component of the prevention agenda and the neighbourhood health model
• Embed EHPs in Integrated Care Systems, ensuring their expertise informs decision-making at strategic and operational levels.
• Invest in local authority environmental health capacity, to match the Plan’s ambition with the practical delivery of healthier homes and communities.
• Ensure that devolution reforms consider the critical role of EHPs in delivering prevention outcomes, protect environmental health capacity during local government restructuring and embed EHP expertise in new devolved structures to support the prevention agenda.
• Ensure that prevention policy reflects the broader determinants of health, including housing, food systems, air quality, and community safety.
• Meet with CIEH to build a stronger link between Government, Parliamentarians and Environmental Health Practitioners, ensuring their insight and experience inform the implementation of the 10-Year Plan at every level.

Environmental health is ready to support the NHS’s transformation. A truly prevention-focused health service must start where health begins: in the places people live, work, learn and play.