Obesity. It seems Philip Larkin was right...

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I hope this is true - it may be a false dawn - but there is evidence of some more sensible thinking around public health, thinking that is moving away from the kneejerk New Puritan and prohibitionist rhetoric. Rather than talk of all-population solutions, we get work looking at targeting. It seems that the lessons of AIDS and HIV - blanket advertising doesn't work nearly as well as a focus on the high risk groups - is beginning to creep into thinking around other public health topics.

Here, for example, is Nick Pearce, Director of left-wing think tank IPPR talking about Early Bird a study looking at the precursors of diabetes in children:

All children gain weight during growth, but EarlyBird is interested in the excess gained. It finds that over 90% of the excess weight in girls, and over 70% in boys, is gained before the child ever gets to school age. These findings support a need to re-direct public health initiatives towards an earlier period in childhood.

And the report goes on to show that:

Daughters of obese mothers are 10 times more likely to be obese than the daughters of normal weight mothers, and the sons of obese fathers six times

So rather than use nannying, all-population bans, taxes and controls, we should begin to target the main at risk group - the children of the obese. And there's more - it seems that exercise isn't the answer either:

Using time-lagged correlation to imply direction of causality, weight gain appears to precede inactivity, rather than inactivity to weight gain.

People don't exercise because they're fat, they're not fat because they don't exercise.

Pearce's piece still talks about 'obesogenic' environments (despite the evidence from the study he cites where the critical environment is the home environment prior to school) and suggests population-wide interventions, so we're not out of the woods yet. But the findings throw up some different - perhaps more effective than the environmental interventions preferred at the moment - possibilities. These could include:

• Better pre- and post-natal information and support especially for obese mothers. We have existing engagement from health authorities through pregnancy and the first year of a child's life - this present an opportunity to target public health interventions
• Understanding of diet and it's relationship to weight is poor (not least among public health professionals) - there is the chance to improve information, again targeted at the parents of young children

What isn't needed is policies that target the pleasures of those who are not overweight and not at risk because some people enjoying those pleasures are obese and at risk. Yet this is still the preferred approach - that and gimmicks like daft awards schemes for takeaways serving smaller portions!

In the end, it seems that Philip Larkin was right after all!

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We voted not to do this...

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A while ago, Bradford Council - by which I mean the full council of 90 elected councillors - decided not to indulge in more research into the supposed "housing crisis" in the District. I recall the debate as I spoke in it and argued that the money spent on a Strategic Housing Market Assessment and a Strategic Housing Land Allocation Appraisal was probably enough to tell us about the District's housing needs.

However, our shiny new portfolio holder, Cllr Slater, thinks differently. We've got into bed with lefty think tank IPPR to play the game of "let's create a housing crisis" (for connoisseurs of crisis I shall mention "lintilla"):


The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), a well-known think tank, is working with Bradford Council to look at issues surrounding housing.

The online survey is aimed at learning about residents’ housing ‘aspirations’, including where they would like to live, whether they would prefer to own or rent and what could most affect their chances of achieving their ambitions.

Where would I like to live? Sometimes it's a top floor penthouse overlooking the marina at Monte Carlo, on occasion a vast, ancient pile set in a rolling North Yorkshire park or perhaps a palazzo in Venice. And I can't achieve this ambition because I'm not yet a billionaire. How this helps with housing issues in Bradford, heaven alone knows! Yet Bradford Council is prepared to waste its resources (against the views of the majority of its elected members) on asking daft questions like this!

What we'll find (and I give you this exclusive insight now) is that people want to live in pleasant surroundings, they want to get out from cramped terraces, to escape from the dreariness of estate life, to dwell in a place with a little less anti-social behaviour and, ideally, to own their house.  People don't want to live in Holme Wood, in Girlington or in Bolton Woods; they want to live in Ilkley, in Addingham or (dare I suggest) in Leeds.

Simply asking a self-selecting (this is an on-line survey with no quota sampling, no randomisation and no checks) audience is both bad research - the IPPR should know better - and lousy politics. What this silly Labour councillor is pushing is an agenda where her scramble for votes justifies a housing policy based on me wanting to live overlooking the marina at Monte Carlo.

There will be lots of lovely words wrapped around this project but, in the end, it will not make a jot of difference to ordinary people in Bradford. What it will do is provide Councillor Slater and other well-off, middle class Labour councillors who don't live anywhere near the places they represent, a platform to pontificate about "exclusion", "poverty" and a made-up "housing crisis".

If Bradford has housing problems, they won't be solved by the IPPR. Of that I'm absolutely sure. And they certainly won't be solved by this indulgent, biased, poorly designed piece of "research".

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