Agenda item

This report provides a progress update following the approval of the refreshed Health and Wellbeing Strategy in July 2024.

Agnieszka Spruds introduced the report which provided a progress update against the refreshed Health and Wellbeing Strategy priorities. In presenting the update, she highlighted the following key points:

• Covid-19 had highlighted deep health inequalities in Brent, leading the Board to rethink its Health and Wellbeing Strategy in 2020 to look beyond health and care services and focus on the wider determinants of health and wellbeing. At the time of the rethink, a three-stage consultation process bringing in a broad range of community voices had shaped that strategy and its commitments.
• Most of the original commitments of the 2020 strategy had been delivered, but many were narrative in nature. This had been right at the time, but made it difficult to measure progress, leading the Board to ask for clearer, data-based commitments and a refresh of the strategy to incorporate that. The refresh had been approved by the Board the previous year and included 49 commitments each with specific KPIs to track delivery.
• She felt that the work happening across the programme with the refreshed commitments was wide-ranging and ambitious, with lots of good examples of innovation and strong partnership working.
• One of the new commitments led to the creation of a Social Progress Index (SPI) which was a new tool bringing together ward-level data and enabling partners to take a more data-informed approach when setting priorities.
• The Board heard that both the Joint Health and Wellbeing Strategy and the Borough Plan were due to end at the same time, allowing their next versions to be developed in parallel and strengthening the links between them. Officers proposed to return to Board in January 2026 with a process and timeline for developing the next strategy in line with the national 10-year health plan.

The Chair then invited questions and comments, with the following points raised:

• Noting that the report marked the Music Mile project as partially achieved, the Board asked why that was, considering the target for number of residents enrolled on the project had been met, which they considered a strong achievement. Officers explained that, due to lack of data, it was unclear how many of those who had enrolled had actually attended the project and therefore this had been marked as partially completed.
• The Board highlighted that there was no current formalised Food Strategy in place for Brent, but felt there was scope to develop one. Members felt it would be helpful to develop an approach across departments, including residents’ services, and asked whether there were plans to develop a Council-wide formalised Food Strategy. Dr Melanie Smith replied that there was a plan to develop a Food Strategy in consultation with the community, as a borough-wide strategy instead of a Council-owned strategy. This reflected the fact that there were many organisations and individuals who were knowledgeable in this area, so a steering group had been established to drive this forward with the community leading the project. She highlighted that the process had been very positive and felt owned by the community, but this meant the progress on finalising the strategy had been slower than if dedicated Council officers were leading that work. It was agreed that the Board would be kept updated on progress of a Food Strategy as there was considerable interest.
• The Board asked how many people in Brent had signed up for the Couch to 5k running programme in Brent, to which officers would provide a written response. Dr Melanie Smith highlighted that the demographics being targeted for the programme were those much less likely to undertake physical activity.
• The Board was pleased many of the targets set out in the strategy had been reached, and asked whether some of those would continue. For example, the oral health bus had proved successful and won an award, and was felt to be needed currently in response to the poor oral health of Brent children. Dr Melanie Smith advised that the vast majority of targets were ongoing, except where they were explicitly a ‘one-off’ such as a new building. The oral health bus would continue, and additional funding had been received for supervised tooth brushing which would be linked with ongoing interventions for Early Years.
• The Board highlighted the need to celebrate the successes of targets that had been achieved to maintain momentum for projects going forward.
• The Board welcomed the formation of a cross-organisational working group to improve engagement with Roma, Gypsy and LGBTQ+ communities and the understanding of their health and wellbeing needs.
• The Board were pleased that funding had been secured from Arts Council England for the Creative People and Places National Portfolio Programme 2026-29, with match funding from Brent partners, and were keen to see that woven together with the Culture Strategy work taking place.

The Board then received a demonstration of the Social Progress Index (SPI), which had been published on the Brent website as a public facing shared data tool. In taking the Board through the tool, Jon Cartwright highlighted the following key points:

• The landing page of the tool provided a high-level overview of the SPI, which was a tool to help measure outcomes in Brent for a variety of social progress markers including health, housing, safety and opportunities. The data could be viewed at a ward level and over time and was updated year on year, allowing comparisons and tracking of trends.
• The tool organised and visualised datasets into three themes; basic human need, foundation of wellbeing and opportunity. There were 12 basic components within those themes.
• The Council hoped the tool could be used for organisations to better understand communities and take data informed decisions for service planning and resource allocation.
• The final tab showed a scorecard providing an overview of all 48 datasets included in the SPI which included all 22 wards and could be filtered individually or have multiple wards selected at one time.
• The social progress in Brent tab allowed comparison of wards at a high level, and allowed for filtering of the 48 datasets to show a combination of different indicators.
• Social progress over time was another tab which showed whether a ward was improving or not for various indicators over time. For Northwick Park and Preston, the tool currently showed improvement, but for other wards such as Willesden Green and Roundwood there were some downward trends.
• This was the first iteration of the SPI, but future years would have data from previous years, allowing progress to be tracked over time.
• Brent Council was considering how the data being visualised on the tool could be used for some of its communications campaign, such as ‘don’t mess with Brent’.
• The Board was advised that the Council was in the process of socialising the tool through internal mechanisms and multi-agency forums to educate people on how to use it and how it could be used to support activity such as bid writing for community grants.

In considering the demonstration, the Board raised the following points:

• The Board could see the value in the tool and its uses for partners. For example, colleagues from CNWL could use the tool to review the social determinants of areas where referrals for ASD and ADHD were most prevalent.
• The Board asked whether ward level data could be split further, highlighting that many wards had different demographics from one area to the next. Jon Cartwright advised that delving further into ward level data risked the robustness of the data.
• The Board asked whether it was possible for health to make requests to include certain indicators, such as the take up of vaccinations. Jon Cartwright confirmed that if the data was available this could be included in updates to the tool in future years. Dr Melanie Smith added there was already some health data within the index.

As no further issues were raised, the Chair drew the discussion to a close and asked the Board to note the update and next steps, including to endorse the proposal to align the future Strategy refresh with the Borough Plan refresh in 2027.