England is a country of stark, avoidable, health inequalities. In practice this means that some groups of people – usually the better-off – live in good health until their seventies, spend a few years with poorer health, and, perhaps, die in their late eighties. Others, usually poorer communities, start to experience significant and preventable illness or disability in their fifties, and are more likely to die in their seventies. The fact that some communities live much shorter lives with far more years spent in preventable ill health is not only very unfair, it is also costly. Working-age people who are too ill or disabled to work don’t pay taxes and require considerable support from the NHS.

What has this got to do with planning? There is robust evidence that many of the things that help people stay healthy are the sort of things that planning influences. This includes the availability and quality of homes; access to good parks and green spaces; air quality; whether or not there are local jobs; whether or not streets and neighbourhoods are easy and attractive to walk or cycle through; whether or not there are local places and spaces to meet or bump into friends and neighbours. In essence, the way that places are planned, designed and managed can help to reduce health inequalities – or inadvertently make them worse.

For the last eight years, the TCPA has worked with more than 60 local authorities, bringing together their planners and public health teams to help them collaborate to ensure that new development supports the health of the local community – and in particular, makes it easier for the people with the worst health to live healthier lives.

Planning policy should be based on evidence; but too often it ignores public health data. This is a huge omission: public health teams have multiple rich sources of data about communities, including the Local Authority Health Profiles produced by Public Health England. This data can be sorted according to types of health inequality, such as childhood obesity, or life expectancy. But, very usefully for planners, it can also be presented spatially. In most places what this shows is that small areas – sometimes very small indeed – can be the home of multiple, concentrated health problems.

In the TCPA’s experience, when councillors and council leaders see the data about local health inequalities set out on a map they are often shocked. It’s not that they didn’t know which communities are struggling, they just didn’t know how severely their health and life expectancy was suffering.

By mapping local health inequalities with local development sites and opportunities the TCPA is able to start conversations about how the new development could support the health of existing communities experiencing the worst health. What does this mean in practice? A very simple example might be that if a large new development is taking place close to an area with high childhood obesity, could it include space for a good quality children’s playground? Or help create safe, attractive routes to an existing park? While this alone won’t solve the problem of childhood obesity, as a contribution to a system-wide approach it is worthwhile.

The TCPA has contributed to a practical guide to help planners find and use public health data in planning policy and decision-making. This should be routine, but is made more difficult by the current impossibility of generating maps that combine both health data and maps with planning data and maps. This is, surely, exactly the type of practical problem that digital planning should be able to address.

The causes of health inequalities are multiple and complex. Planning, alone, cannot solve them. But, as Prof Michael Marmot’s seminal report, ‘Fair Society Healthy Lives’ made clear, if, as a society we are going to improve the health of the population, we need to concentrate our efforts on the people and places that are suffering the worst health. By making it easier for planners to know where those communities are, digital technology has an important role to play.