PHE's mission is "to protect and improve the nation’s health and to address inequalities". It employs approximately 5,000 staff, who are mostly scientists, researchers and public health professionals. It announced plans to move its headquarters and 2,750 staff to Harlow on a former GlaxoSmithKline site in 2017. PHE laboratories provide an extensive range of microbiological diagnostic tests.
PHE took over the responsibility for 'Be Clear on Cancer' campaigns after it was created in the Health and Social Care Act 2012. Campaigns have been run on lung cancer, bowel cancer, oesophago-gastric and kidney & bladder cancer. PHE is also responsible for Change4Life and ACT FAST. In January 2014 it launched a campaign against smoking called 'Health Harms' on television and billboards across England.
Public Health England carried out contact tracing in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, but this ceased on 12 March 2020 in view of the wide spread of infection in the population. From 19 March, consistent with the opinion of the Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens, PHE no longer classified COVID-19 as a "High consequence infectious disease". This reversed an interim recommendation made in January 2020, due to more information about the disease confirming low overall mortality rates, greater clinical awareness, and a specific and sensitive laboratory test, the availability of which continues to increase. The statement said "the need to have a national, coordinated response remains" and added "this is being met by the government’s COVID-19 response". This meant cases of COVID-19 are no longer managed by HCID treatment centres only. From 29 April, PHE collated daily reporting of the number of deaths of people in England with a positive COVID-19 test. Daily numbers published by the government had previously only counted deaths in hospital.
Criticism and other published comment
Public Health England has been criticised for downplaying mental health within its overall resourcing and agenda; in 2011 the Royal College of Psychiatrists stated its concern that there appeared to be "few, or no, commitments or resources within either the Department of Health or Public Health England to take the public mental health agenda forward." The agency was criticised by Professor Martin McKee in January 2014. He said that continuing health inequalities among London boroughs was a scandal, and claimed coalition reforms had left it unclear who was supposed to analyse health data and tackle the problems highlighted. The agency was criticised by The Lancet for allegedly using weak evidence in a review of electronic cigarettes to endorse an estimate that e-cigarette use is 95% less hazardous than smoking: "it is on this extraordinarily flimsy foundation that PHE based the major conclusion and message of its report"... this "raises serious questions not only about the conclusions of the PHE report, but also about the quality of the agency's peer review process." Authors of the PHE report subsequently published a document clarifying that their endorsement of the 95% claim did not stand on the single study criticised in The Lancet, but on their broad review of toxicological evidence. The agency has also been criticised for "serious questions about transparency and conflicts of interest" regarding this review, that PHE's response "did not even begin to address the various relationships and funding connections" in question, and that this "adds to questions about the credibility of the organisation’s advice". A 2017 question in the House of Lords revealed that a position underpinning UK Government policy, namely "that well run and regulated modern municipal waste incinerators are not a significant risk to public health remains valid", was asserted in advance of the results having been obtained from a study commissioned by Public Health England to answer the question whether municipal waste incinerators did, in fact, constitute a significant risk to public health.
