It now seems hard to believe it but before the health reforms, we had no idea how much was spent on public health as PCTs were simply left to spend what they wished from their overall NHS budgets. 

So, it is not surprising it took repeated attempts from the Department of Health to nail down how much PCTs were spending on local authorities' new public health functions.  But this process led to the two-year local authority funding settlement of £2.66bn in 2013-14 and £2.79bn in 2014-15.

Since then, Directors of Public Health have been working with others in local authorities, working out what to spend it on.  In June, early analysis was reported of five local authorities who published their local plans.  But the Department for Communities and Local Government has just published much richer data, easy to miss among broader spending statistics on its website.  This gives us the complete picture for the first time.

Figure 1 shows the high level categories of spending (this can be broken down further into mandatory and child and adult spend).