A DECADE of austerity and “massive cuts” to town hall budgets have led to failures in coping with public health threats like listeria, according to a former health chief.

Independent public health consultant Professor John Ashton described 17 deaths linked to separate outbreaks of listeria and streptococcus earlier this year as “serious failures” of the public health system.

The Department of Health’s former North West regional director of public health, who resigned after 13 years in 2006 over foundation trusts, said that public health establishments had been “whittled away” while budgets and salaries had been cut “dramatically” since responsibility for public health moved to local government in 2013.

In the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine today he warns that nearly a decade of austerity and “massive cuts” to local authority budgets mean that environmental health departments are no longer apt to “keep ahead of the threats to human health.”

He said: “It is now time to digest these latest failings of a public health system that was only put in place six years ago as part of [former health secretary] Andrew Lansley’s structural changes to the NHS and for public health.

“There is a schism in which the clinical perspective in local government has been disappearing and the links between local authorities and the NHS have become ever more dysfunctional.

“This has been reflected in the deterioration in performance in areas that include sexual health, immunisation and vaccination and screening programmes.

“To add to the agony, 10 years of austerity and massive cuts to local authority budgets have resulted in attrition of environmental health departments which no longer have the capacity to keep ahead of the threats to human health despite their best efforts.”

Professor Ashton warned that the lesson from history was not to embark on another reorganisational “folly.”