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Saving money by appointing joint, junior or inexperienced leaders will undermine local public health Giving responsibility for public health to local authorities, together with a ring-fenced budget to manage it, is obviously the right thing to do. Councils used to have a role in health back in the 1970s; like many issues in public policy, the more things change the more they remain the same. Local authorities are well placed to manage public health because they can tailor strategies to local needs. Now Michael Marmot's work on the social determinants of health is so widely accepted, local authorities...

The transfer of responsibilty for public health to local government is a great opportunity, but councils must pay it the attention it is due Amid the cuts and redundancies, local government's new responsibility for public health is a great opportunity. While public health is hardly new territory for councils – more than 80 public health directors were joint appointments between councils and primary care trusts – formal assumption of the powers is momentous. Public health teams which assume little will change for the first few months are likely to be disabused of that notion pretty rapidly....

Read the advice of our expert panel on how local authorities can prepare for taking on responsbility for public health next month. Share your ideas in the comments thread Edward Davie is a Lambeth councillor and chair of the borough's health scrutiny committee What can be done to prepare? Councils need to engage with their communities by finding out what people want and how they can deliver it. In Lambeth, our commissioning model is being changed to a co-operative one where residents actively participate in decision making and contribute to delivery. This is particularly important in health...

Redefining care needs to save money is a worrying trend. This week our secret council officer shares their experience We all know that cash-strapped local authorities are making qualification for care funding ever more stringent, but what about one of their other duties: that of funding care and support of people with learning disabilities? I am writing this (anonymously for obvious reasons) at what would appear to be the starting point of a long battle to maintain the financial support of my sister, who has for many years been a resident in a West Country care home for those with learning disabilities...

There's much to commend Andy Burnham's vision, but sharing the cash pool won't achieve integration – it's a culture thing If there is one lesson that can be drawn from Andrew Lansley's health reforms, it is that anyone proposing a major shakeup of the NHS should be required to provide compelling and overwhelming evidence that it is the right thing to do. This is the lens through which the idea of shadow health secretary, Andy Burnham, to hand about £63bn of health service commissioning to local government should be judged. In a speech to the King's Fund on Thursday outlining...

Government must hand control of health to councils if it wants the results communities desperately need to see The challenges facing local government in 2013 are not too dissimilar to the drivers behind the first public health act in 1848. The aim then was to tackle extreme vulnerability as well as enabling improved general wellbeing. The specifics may have changed but the principles have not. What has changed is the sheer scale of the challenge. You could say that a perfect storm is heading for local government: a combination of growing demand, due to our ageing population and poor economic situation...

Public Health England will support local government and the NHS by providing expert knowledge, research and know-how Further improvements to our nation's health can only become a reality through localism. As a population we are getting older and increasingly suffering from chronic disease, and despite the best efforts of the NHS this requires a more radical response. The NHS cannot solve this alone. The solutions are about so much more than health services – the places we live, the start we get in life, the opportunities that come along and the choices we make. That's why it's vital...

New local government public health briefings from Nice set out what interventions work best to keep people healthy Local government is preparing to take on a wider remit for public health from April next year, so the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), which oversees clinical practice, is preparing information to assist councillors and local authority staff in finding out which public health policies are most effective in improving health while providing the best value for money. Local government public health briefings have been developed with contributions from councillors...