Hertfordshire's 'growing and ageing' population is increasing the demand on social care services, highlighting the need for preventative measures, according to a council report.

Plans for a £3.4 million prevention and health inequalities fund were discussed at a meeting of Herts County Council's public health and community safety committee on Thursday, January 30.

A report into the £3.4 million fund said: "Hertfordshire has a growing and ageing population, which is increasing demand for local health and care services. The proportion of people in Hertfordshire with one or more health conditions is increasing.

"There has been a large increase in the number of Hertfordshire residents who are unable to work due to ill-health. The cost-of-living crisis is compounding the difficulties many people already face, particularly the most vulnerable and disadvantaged communities in Hertfordshire."

The plans would be financed through Public Health reserves, and have been developed by the Public Health team. The fund is expected to have a total value of £3.4m over a 3-year period, and the council states "prevention has the potential to achieve a median return on investment of 2.5 times in the local authority, increasing to 4.7 times where the preventative approach is underpinned by evidence and intelligence".

"Funding will be for transformational large-scale proposals that are clearly aligned to existing strategic priorities for ill-health prevention and for reducing health inequalities in Hertfordshire."

The fund will have three priority themes:

• Ageing well – preventative programmes, services and support for healthy ageing.

• Healthy weight – preventative programmes and support for healthy weight, particularly focused on priority groups including women who are overweight or obese in pregnancy and women who are planning a pregnancy.

• Economic inactivity and ill health – public health interventions to support people to return to work who have been long term absent due to ill-health.

Draft information about the fund has been published as part of the council's wider Integrated Plan, which allocates funding for services across the council. Individual projects supporting the three key objectives – ageing, weight and economic inactivity – will be developed over the next few months are are expected to go live by June.

The report adds: "The need for a strong emphasis on prevention has never been greater. Public sector finances are tighter than they have ever been, and the availability of funding for early help and support is diminishing as organisations are forced to use the limited funding available for core statutory activity.

"Using the Public Health grant for investment in high impact transformational up-stream projects will deliver longer term benefits both to individuals through projects which help them to improve their health and wellbeing, and to HCC and other organisations through actions which prevent, reduce or delay the need for public services."

At Thursday's meeting, director of public health Sarah Perman told councillors how money had accrued in reserves partly as a result of the Covid pandemic.

She said: "The public health team built up some fairly sizeable reserves over the last few years. This predated the pandemic, but the pandemic did have quite an impact on the level of reserves and that was mainly due to two factors.

"One, that some of our services and programmes simply couldn't run during the pandemic because of lockdown, but also we did receive additional funding from central government… that was important because of the additional responsibilities we had during the pandemic for protecting the health of residents. We were also able to rebadge some of our core expenditure, which built up this surplus which has also gone into reserves.

"So, the reserves at the end of our last financial year was around £12.9 million. So really, quite significant. We felt it was prudent to have a plan to run down those reserves over the next few years and we now do have a plan… we're modelling running down our reserves to around five per cent of the public health grant by 2027/28, so that will be around £2.7 million."

After highlighting some spending commitments, Ms Perman said there was enough money in "surplus reserves" for projects such as the £3.4 million prevention and health inequalities fund, with public health teams in other authorities taking similar action to disperse of their excess reserves.