The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World (with Sir Michael Marmot)

Dramatic differences in health are not a simple matter of rich and poor – poverty alone doesn't drive ill health, but inequality does. Indeed, suicide, heart disease, lung disease, obesity, and diabetes are all linked to social disadvantage.

In his book The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World, Professor Sir Michael Marmot argues that in every country, people at relative social disadvantage suffer health disadvantage and shorter lives – a key reason why we need to address societal imbalances in power, money and resources.

Since the book was published in 2015, Marmot's work has gone on to reveal how the health gap has grown between wealthy and deprived areas of the UK, and how inequalities in social and economic conditions before the pandemic contributed to the high and unequal death toll from Covid-19.

In this event, Sir Michael and the other panellists discussed why it is more urgent than ever that we tackle inequalities in order to improve health, why more progress has not been made in the last decade, and how we can rectify this failure in the era of levelling up.

Panel

• Professor Sir Michael Marmot, Director of the UCL Institute of Health Equity, former President of the World Medical Association, and author of The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World
• Jo Bibby, Director of Health at the Health Foundation
• Chris Thomas, Senior Research Fellow (Health) at the Institute for Public Policy Research, and author of The Five Health Frontiers: A New Radical Blueprint
• Jabeer Butt, Chief Executive of the Race Equality Foundation
• Professor Richard Trembath, Senior Vice President (Health & Life Sciences), King's College London, and Executive Director of King’s Health Partners
• Will Snell, Chief Executive of the Fairness Foundation (chair)

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