Patterns of municipal health expenditure in interwar England and Wales

This article aims to fill a gap in the history of medical services in England and Wales in the interwar period by focusing on the historiographically neglected municipal sector--a relative neglect that is particularly unjustified given that this sector provided an increasingly wide array of medical services over the period. Focusing on the highly urbanized county boroughs, this article investigates whether and how expenditure on municipal health services changed over the interwar period, and whether these patterns were replicated by boroughs across England and Wales. It is found that many of the largest personal health services were experiencing a common pattern of growing investment over the period, but that county boroughs did not act uniformly in their spending decisions. Considered regionally, the Northeast and the West Midlands were found to perform poorly in expenditure terms compared to the data set as a whole, while the large conurbations of Leeds, Manchester, and Liverpool raised the average performance of the Northwest and Yorkshire. Regional patterns are found to be less consistent in the south of the country, where voluntary provision and demands arising from the boroughs' geographical position (for example, seaside resorts) may have exerted significant influences over levels of expenditure on health.