From the Chamber - David Hare - Becoming a Marmot Borough – what’s it all about?

Becoming a Marmot Borough – what’s it all about?

Wokingham Borough Council is aiming to become a Marmot Borough over the next few years. This is because we all want Wokingham Borough to be a place where everyone, whatever their problems, delights or experience, can thrive.

Despite being a healthy borough overall, not everyone is experiencing that positive health equally. Differences exist between our communities that can be avoided. Life expectancy is used as an overall measure of a person’s health and wellbeing. In Wokingham’s most deprived neighbourhoods, people are dying, on average, five years earlier than people living in the least deprived neighbourhoods. This is preventable. Change is possible. We are working hard to change things and want to do more, that is what Marmot is about, increasing equality.

Professor Michael Marmot is a doctor. In the 1970s he was working in a hospital and asked himself this question: ‘Why am I treating people and then sending them back to the conditions that make them sick?” For the last 50 years Professor Marmot and colleagues have researched how to reduce inequalities across communities.

A Marmot Borough is somewhere that recognises that to create a community where everybody can thrive, we need all the right underlying building blocks of health and wellbeing in place. These are the things that contribute to health and wellbeing across a person’s life and include: stable jobs, fair pay, quality housing and good education. There is lots of great work already happening across the Borough. However, in some of our communities’ inequalities persist. We need to collectively understand and focus on the gaps in the building blocks underlying these differences, creating the inequalities.

Professor Sir Michael Marmot and his team, at the Institute of Health Equity, have carried out a lot of research to understand how places can work most effectively to reduce inequalities. Their research shows that there are eight areas of focus that will have the biggest impact.

1. Give every child the best start in life

2. Enable all children, young people and adults to maximise their capabilities and have control over their lives

3. Create fair employment and good work for all

4. Ensure a healthy standard of living for all

5. Create and develop healthy and sustainable places and communities

6. Strengthen the role and impact of ill health prevention

7. Tackle racism, discrimination and their outcomes

8. Pursue environmental sustainability and health equity together

Over the rest of 2024, we will work with partners across the Borough, along with the support of the Institute of Health Equity, to decide where and how we want to further concentrate our efforts. The Institute of Health Equity will continue to work with us across 2025 as we take action so that our work can go further and be more effective. This is an exciting venture to promote health equality for all. I hope that in about 6 months I can let you know again where3 we are going with Marmot as we start to see what we need to do.