In the UK, and more so in deprived areas, many people are dying earlier than they should from largely preventable chronic diseases such as cancer and heart disease. To prevent this and create communities where everyone can thrive, we need the right building blocks in place including jobs, good pay, and environments free of pollution and where it is easy to make healthy choices - eat the right food, exercise, and so on. In many communities these building blocks are missing. This project aims to address this. Local governments across England are responsible for many of these building blocks and can, therefore, significantly improve health and wellbeing. There are many ways to do this, for example, changing the focus of their local economy to consider population wellbeing alongside measures such as productivity, ensuring that organisations they contract have fair employment practices, using planning rules to reduce the density of fast-food outlets and implementing car-free cities. However, local governments face many barriers to implementing these measures including a lack of capacity and locally relevant evidence on the most important building blocks in their areas and how they can best be altered to improve health. One of the building blocks that remains poorly understood at local level is the commercial sector, despite growing evidence of its major impacts on health and equity. On one hand local businesses create jobs and contribute to the economy. On the other, 40% of chronic disease deaths are directly linked to transnational corporations manufacturing just four products - tobacco, ultra-processed foods, alcohol and fossil fuels (fossil fuel deaths primarily due to air pollution). These corporations actively oppose interventions that local governments could implement. They particularly oppose the most effective interventions - those that work at population or community level (e.g. restricting advertising of or outlets for their products). To ensure that local governments can harness the positive impacts of the commercial sector while mitigating the negative ones, it is essential to better understand these 'commercial determinants of health' (CDOH). Health Hub: Systems Approaches to Commercial Determinants of Health and Equity is an ambitious new research cluster that brings together local governments, researchers, and civil society groups to work with local populations to improve the health, wellbeing and equity of communities across England. They will do this by better understanding the building blocks - including the commercial factors- that impact on communities' health and use that knowledge to identify, implement and evaluate the population-level interventions most likely to improve health, wellbeing and equity at scale. It will do this through seven interconnected packages of work that, working at local government level, will: 1.Explore the building blocks influencing health in each area as part of a complex system in which building blocks and interventions can all impact on each other, using this to identify the most important points in the system to intervene to improve health; 2.Assess the evidence for population level interventions that can be applied locally to improve health at scale and reduce health inequities; 3.Identify the facilitators and barriers to implementing these interventions and develop resources and support systems to help overcome these barriers; 4.Model the anticipated health and economic impacts of the interventions, comparing different ways of estimating these impacts and compiling new large-scale data resources for local governments; 5.Support implementation of chosen interventions using the resources and support systems developed; 6.Evaluate the impacts of interventions, resources and support systems, whether and how they inter-link and vary with context; 7.Ensure the data, evidence, resources and support systems developed can be used to maximum effect well beyond the project.

Over the coming decades the world will face a wide range of complex, new and persistent public mental health challenges, exacerbated by disruptive events, many of which can be fully addressed only through strategies and investments that improve lifelong public mental health outcomes for everyone. 1 in 6 adults in England have a common mental health condition. Mental distress and ill health are associated with significant disability, sickness absence, unemployment, and suicide attempts. Three quarters of all mental health conditions have occurred in young people by the age of 24 years. Despite widespread acknowledgement that mental distress and illness make a substantial contribution to the global burden of disease, there is still a major gap in evidence to inform policy making for their primary prevention. We will establish the 'Prevention of Risks and Onset of Mental Health problems through Interdisciplinary Stakeholder Engagement' (PROMISE) Population Mental Health Improvement Cluster, which will create new opportunities for population-based improvements in mental health. We will focus on three challenge areas: 1. Children and young people; 2. Suicide and self-harm prevention; 3. Multiple long-term conditions. Challenge areas will be supported by four cross-cutting themes: 1. Partners in policy, implementation and lived experience; 2. Data, linkages and causal inference; 3. Narrowing inequalities; 4. Training and capacity building. We will work with stakeholders across public health, local government, voluntary organisations and interdisciplinary academic experts, and people with lived experience of adversities which impact mental health, to identify and rigorously evaluate population-level interventions which hold the greatest promise for the improvement of mental health. The structure of our cluster reflects the integration of academic, policy and lived experience in leadership and delivery, which will lead to systems change and the ability to work effectively across traditional silos which have held progress in this area behind. We will use a range of large-scale datasets, including representative studies which follow people over time, nationally representative studies of health, and data generated when people come into contact with health and other services, take part in census, alongside information from children in schools, and the linkages between these, for our investigations. We will use statistical methods in this data to understand which population-interventions benefit people's mental health and reduce inequalities. We will draw on the wide-ranging interdisciplinary expertise of our team to develop a unique suite of training (seminars/ tutorials/ short training videos) which will be freely available, the training will be entitled "New ways of working in population mental health" and will cover a range of topics useful to researchers, practitioners, and people with lived experience. Our cluster will foster methods to develop creative and innovative solutions by working with people who have not applied their expertise to improving population health before, through a range of approaches:1. We will work with arts-based practitioners to develop creative outputs (films, children's books/ comic strips, animations, infographics, public photography and art exhibitions), which will also ensure inclusive engagement. 2. We will convene a series of interdisciplinary 'sandpit' events to engage a wide range of interdisciplinary groups, to develop innovative projects across challenge areas. 3. We will convene policy roundtables with support from English, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland Government representatives, to bring together stakeholders, experts, policymakers, and the public to engage in discussion on cluster challenges to gather feedback, build consensus, and develop actionable recommendations. Our findings will be co-produced with people with lived experience.