Why are we still surprised by the link between wealth and health?

At a party conference in Blackpool, I arranged to meet a friend for dinner. We went to a restaurant that was lauded as one of the town’s best.

It was fine dining, sort of. The waitress plonked (they plonk in Blackpool, not put) down our first courses and scarcely concealing her derision at the artfully-arranged, yet somewhat sparse, offerings, inquired: “Are you sure you don’t want bread with those?”

At a formal dinner, also in Blackpool, the waitresses came round with the vegetables. I said to the first: “What’s the choice?” She replied: “You can have chips, you can have roasted, you can have mashed. You can have one, you can have two, you can have three.” The second was holding two dishes. “Cauliflower cheese or cauliflower?”

I’m remembering these carbohydrate-loaded, fat-inducing events, and more, because Blackpool has been officially named “the unhealthiest place in England”. Wokingham, in Berkshire, is the healthiest.

Much has been made of this ranking. It’s been hailed as “the first composite health index in the world after ministers asked statisticians to assess the health of the nation in a bid to measure the effects of government policy on health.”

The scores, collected by the Office for National Statistics and financial and actuarial consultants Lane Clark & Peacock or LCP (this in itself is a worrying development – what next, the official Covid figures brought to us, courtesy of Dignity Funerals?) were found by combining different health factors in every area such as dementia, cancer, alcohol misuse and adult obesity.

Blackpool managed to achieve a mark of 86 while Wokingham received an “overall health score” of 110. Second best was Richmond upon Thames with 107.7 and Windsor and Maidenhead with 106.5. Southern districts – West Berkshire, Surrey, Bracknell Forest, Buckinghamshire, Rutland, Kingston upon Thames and Hampshire – made up the rest of the 10 healthiest places. Down with Blackpool were Hull with 91 and Stoke-on-Trent with 91.4, followed by Middlesbrough, Hartlepool, Knowsley, Doncaster, Nottingham, St Helens and Salford.

Dr Jonathan Pearson-Stuttard, head of health analytics at LCP, said the index of 149 local authority areas should be viewed as “an asset to the nation”.

Apart from getting the individual positions right there is nothing here I could not have predicted – probably in my sleep come to think of it.

Let’s get something clear: Blackpool is not the unhealthiest place in England. Neither is Wokingham the healthiest.

In fact, the two are interchangeable. Blackpool has bracing fresh air, wide roads, plenty of open spaces, and little, as far as I’ve ever noticed, pollution. Wokingham is leafy and green.

The difference is the people and the cards they have been dealt. One place is a rundown seaside resort, home to much poverty and to some of the most deprived council estates in Britain. The other is rich stockbroker belt. If the former worked at all they carry industrial injuries as a result; if the latter had to work it was sitting down, in offices. One town has decrepit public housing stock, the other’s is smarter. One suffers from financial poverty and with that, health inequality; the other does not. Need I go on?

Ask for a salad in Blackpool and they look at you askance; don’t eat your salad in Wokingham and you will be asked if everything is okay. I’ve never had a salad on its own in Blackpool, always with chips or jacket potato or a roll.

Walk around the streets parallel to Blackpool’s “Golden Mile” and you will see chippies and kebab shops galore, and bookies and bars selling ales at prices a Southerner would not believe. Do the same in Wokingham and you have to dodge the handwritten blackboards promising quinoa, granola and vitamin-boosting juices. If there’s bread at all it is sourdough. One has fat people, the other thin.

Actually, if you look closely enough you will find healthy people in Blackpool. They live in nice houses, have good jobs and take care of themselves. There aren’t so many, mind, but they do exist, and when they go out they venture to neighbouring, genteel Lytham St Annes. Likewise, in Wokingham there are unhealthy folk who spend what money they earn on booze, fags and scratch cards. Generally, one group is educated and are paid more; the other isn’t.

Apart from generating sensationalist headlines it’s difficult to see what was hoped to achieve by this study. Apparently there are plans to make it UK-wide. Don’t hold your breath: parts of Glasgow and the Valleys will be in the unhealthiest category; St Andrews and St Davids will be among the healthiest. And guess what, the unhealthiest will feature in the list of places hardest hit by Covid.

I will give you the conclusion, minus the map: being well-off begets wellbeing. We need to inform and to invest, to bring jobs and skills and prosperity – to give the people in the places at the bottom the same life chances and opportunities as those at the top. There’s a phrase on trend for it, one that is beloved of this Prime Minister: levelling up.

To be fair, after all that painstaking effort, that was also Dr Pearson-Stuttard’s verdict: “The numbers reveal clear and substantial differences across England and should be a wake-up call to the government to deliver on its manifesto pledge to level up regional inequalities.”

I hark back to going into a bar in Blackpool to meet someone away from the throng of the conference in the nearby Winter Gardens. So much for a quiet location: it was packed with boozers, none of them delegates, in the middle of a weekday afternoon.

There was also the Blackpool conference pub meal where the local at the next table ordered the “special” of “chicken tikka masala, rice and naan bread” and “a bowl of chips on the side”. Followed by the “sweet of the day” – apple crumble and custard. All washed down with three pints of beer. At lunchtime.

Please ministers, instead of producing nonsense surveys, get on and actually make a difference.