HEN Webinar Recording: June - Business Responsibility for Community Health
Health Equity Network Webinar Recording: June - Business Responsibility for Community Health
This month's webinar brought together Professor Laura Spence (King's College London) and Elizabeth Bachrad (Business for Health) to explore the role of business in tackling health inequalities at a local level.
Laura Spence shared early findings from a King's College London research project based in Southwark, exploring how businesses — particularly SMEs, which employ the majority of the UK workforce — already contribute to community health in often-overlooked ways, from providing spaces of belonging to supporting local employment. She argued the existing literature is too focused on large corporations and "commercial determinants of health," missing the very different, relational way smaller, community-embedded businesses operate. Key barriers weren't motivation but resource and capacity constraints, and a lack of shared language between health and business worlds. She called for reframing community health as a shared stake across actors, rather than a bolt-on responsibility.
Elizabeth Bachrad built on this with the concept of businesses as "anchor institutions" — organisations that deploy capital, hiring, and procurement locally to support their communities. She shared UK examples (Leeds Anchor Network, Southwest Anchor Partnership) and an international case study from Denmark's youth employment strategy, along with practical measurement tools (UCL Partners' anchor toolkit, Leeds' progression framework) for organisations wanting to track their impact.
The Q&A covered evaluating long-term social outcomes, the case for Chambers of Commerce as conveners of small business engagement, and how larger and smaller businesses might collaborate without adding administrative burden.