The Government must make ‘good work’ central to its health inequalities and jobs strategies argues a new Fabian report.

Despite making high profile commitments in each area, the Government has not seriously connected the Health Department and the DWP work programme says the report, stressing that fixing these missing links is increasingly urgent given fiscal pressures on spending.

Authors Howard Stoate – a GP for 30 years and Labour MP until 2010 – and Bryan Jones set out a series of proposals aimed at “changing our working culture and how we perceive the jobs we do, finally reversing the stubborn trend of rising health inequalities.”

The report says that the last Labour government did well with targeted initiatives to cut coronary heart disease and cancer rates, promote healthy living and cut smoking, but that further expensive rounds of NHS reform risk missing the point that the underlying causes of health inequalities “lie well outside the remit of the Department of Health. The NHS may be better equipped than it’s ever been to deal with the consequences of health inequalities; tackling their fundamental causes however is a challenge that’s sadly well beyond its capabilities.”

With the NHS instructed to do ‘more with less’ after the Comprehensive Spending Review, 'Work, The Grand Cure' argues that a happier, more fulfilled workforce will create a more productive economy and a more equal society – and consequently be less of a burden on stretched NHS resources.

Making those gains depends on being prepared to make imaginative policy shifts even at a time of austerity, including:

•    Introducing a free public transport ‘happy hour’ every Monday between 10 and 11am to make commuting easier and encourage flexible working

•    Compelling employers to disclose salary levels of each post in their organisation, to strip away the culture of secrecy around top earners and stimulate greater wage equality

•    Offering fiscal incentives to employers to release a fixed percentage of employees from each rung of their pay scale for voluntary work

•    Commissioning a new coalition Green Paper on commuting and the extended economy setting out the long-term benefits that would flow from a cut in commuting

•    Setting up a ‘good work’ accreditation scheme that measures an employers’ commitment to enhancing employees’ control over their work and stamping out monotony

Dr Howard Stoate was MP for Dartford until 2010 and is a former member of the Health Select Committee. He is a practicing GP. Bryan Jones is a research student at the LSE and a former Dartford councillor.

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