Send a letter to Seema

 A template of a  letter to Seema can be found by clicking HERE.

You may well be asking “Who is this Seema"?  Well, Seema Kennedy MP is the  Minister in the Department of Health and Social Care responsible  for Public Health and Primary Care.

The Forum is now appealing to all its members, supporters and Newsletter readers to write a short, simple single-page letter to Seema Kennedy asking:

Why has the assessment of public health funding for Enfield, the borough with the fastest growing population in London, not been updated since 2015, despite having some of the most deprived and poverty-stricken wards in the country?

Why is Enfield’s public health grant of £47 per head of our growing population so much lower than the average £73 for all London’s boroughs?

Without waiting for the next spending review in 2020 will you now ensure that  Enfield gets a fair deal for funding its vital public health services - funding the prevention of ill-health and thus helping to sustain our coveted NHS?.

Please write to Seema Kennedy MP, Parliamentary Under- Secretary of State for Public Health, House of Commons, London, SW1A OAA.

So please, use the information below  to write your own letter to Seema Kennedy. Why not get friends and neighbours to sign it too?  but write it NOW and please let the Forum office 020 8807 2076 know you’ve done it.

Our Fairer Public Health Funding for Enfield campaign is not something that just affects older people. Public Health helps everyone - babies, toddlers and teenagers - and unless we win the battle for fairer funding now we will be letting down all future generations for years to come.

How can it be fair and right that Islington is this year getting £103 per head of its population, Camden £100 and neighbouring Haringey on our doorstep is getting £69 - almost 50 per cent more than our £47 - when these three boroughs are linked with Enfield in a North Central London NHS consortium pledged to reduce health inequalities for their 1.5 million citizens?

The Forum has received a letter from the policy manager. public health systems and strategy, at the Department of Health & Social Care, telling us that although they are giving Kensington and Chelsea residents £130 per head to spend on public health  “we do not consider a per capita basis to be the best way of determining allocations.”

So if that is the case why do the Whitehall policymakers take the lazy route of just looking at what we had last year and then cut it. This is what they have done every year and this year we are down 3.6 per cent or by £444,000.

This means there’ll be less to spend this year on sexual health services, NHS health checks, drug and alcohol abuse, smoking cessation, tackling obesity and much, much more.