WNHSC Health and Wellbeing Alliance send letter to all Welsh Government departments on inequalities

Wales has the highest poverty rate among the four UK nations, with almost one in four (23%) people in poverty. According to the Bevan Foundation, the cost-of-living crisis is exacerbating poverty and inequalities in Wales. Audit Wales recently called poverty the single major challenge facing all tiers of government.

A national delivery plan to tackle poverty and inequality is desperately needed.

Our organisations are calling for a national joined-up delivery plan that sets out milestones, timelines and clear targets detailing what every Welsh Government department is doing to tackle inequalities within their remit, and how ministers are working together to reduce the impact of poverty and deprivation on the people of Wales. Led by the first minister and jointly written with external stakeholders, this plan should be shaped by lived experience.

Now we have written to Welsh Government ministers to ask them to tell us how they and their officials are working to reduce the impact of inequalities and poverty.

This letter is signed by: 

Asthma + Lung UK Cymru
BMA Cymru Wales
British Association of Social Workers
British Geriatrics Society
British Society for Heart Failure
Care & Repair Cymru
College of Paramedics
Community Housing Cymru
Community Leisure UK
Fair Treatment for the Women of Wales
Learning Disability Wales
Leonard Cheshire
Marie Curie
MS Society Cymru
National Autistic Society Cymru
Parkinson's UK Cymru
RNIB Cymru 
Royal College of Anaesthetists
Royal College of General Practitioners
Royal College of Nursing
Royal College of Physicians
Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow
Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists
Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh
Royal College of Surgeons of England
Royal Pharmaceutical Society
Samaritans Cymru
Shine Cymru
Stroke Association Cymru
Tenovus Cancer Care
Wales Council for Voluntary Action
Wales Neurological Alliance
Welsh NHS Confederation

The Welsh NHS Confederation Health and Wellbeing Alliance sub-group on health inequalities is convened by the Royal College of Physicians and has published Mind the gap: what’s stopping change?, which was endorsed by 50 organisations in July 2022. Later the same year we published Everything affects health, which describes how organisations from across Wales are working collaboratively across health, social services, housing, the arts, benefits and welfare advice, transport, loneliness and isolation, climate change, air pollution and much more.