'We don't take scrutiny seriously enough in GM'

Healthcare is now run from Manchester - but is it being held to account?

Dear members — today’s reporting by Jack Dulhanty gets at an issue we’ve been wondering about for a few months now: the question of how power in Greater Manchester is held to account. Specifically, the powers that were given to this city region to run its healthcare system.

After we published our exclusive in October about how the powerful local health body had missed its headline cancer target and then brazenly memory-holed the promise in its five-year review (‘Greater Manchester pledged to cut cancer deaths. Then the promise disappeared’), we got an email from a reader — a former council leader — who said the story rang true. “As somebody who sat on that board I never got my head around how to use my place to hold it to account,” the reader said. More details in Jack’s story.

That’s after our mini-briefing, Covid-19 latest and a fantastic Salford photo from 1971.