Published on: 23,Jul 2025

Will the 10 Year Health Plan get millions more moving?

Emma Hutchins, Influencing Manager, The Richmond Group

What does the 10 Year Health Plan hold for physical activity? The Richmond Group’s physical activity and health influencing manager Emma Hutchins reflects on the ambition, measures and opportunities in store, and looks at whether it will create the conditions for people with long-term conditions to move.

Physical activity has a major role to play in the prevention, management, treatment and rehabilitation of many long-term conditions, yet it is an underutilised tool in healthcare. One of the Richmond Group’s priorities is to support people with long-term conditions to be active, which we do by influencing policy and practice, and leading the We Are Undefeatable campaign to inspire and support our audience to find ways to move that work for them.  

NHS England’s Four Ways Forward was a notable step towards embedding movement into healthcare. We were eager to see whether the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC)’s 10 Year Health Plan had seized the opportunity to further embed movement.  

As well as the ‘long-term aim to have millions more people moving and exercising regularly as part of their lifestyle’ – words that echo our own report Millions More Moving – the plan includes some concrete commitments: 

• A strategy for physical activity from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). 

• A national campaign to motivate millions to walk or run. 

• A bidding process to name the UK’s most physically active community each year, with the Ministry of Communities, Housing and Local Government. 

• A digital points scheme to reward people taking action to improve their health. 

• A boost for active travel, tackling both physical inactivity and air pollution. 

It’s encouraging to see the role of physical activity recognised, not just as exercise but specifically movement. We know that for people with long-term conditions, finding ways to move is about more than structured or organised activity, and we have long called for a change in the narrative to reflect that.  

It’s also encouraging that the Government highlights the ‘huge inequalities across the country’ in levels of inactivity. From Sport England’s Active Lives, we know that the least active are often living with long-term conditions or disability, older, in deprived areas, and from ethnic minority backgrounds. This recognition must underpin the Government’s approach, ensuring measures truly reach those who would benefit most yet face the biggest barriers. 

And we welcome DHSC’s commitment to work with other government bodies. Getting millions more moving requires a whole-systems approach to bake movement into daily life – going beyond health and baking movement into daily life. However too often physical activity has fallen between the gaps; we need DHSC to make strong connections across policy areas and ensure the right levers, structures and resources in place to achieve shared aims. 

There are still unanswered questions. Will DCMS’s promised physical activity strategy go further than the previous government’s ‘Get Active’, which had little to offer people with long-term conditions? Will the bidding process for the most active community acknowledge the inequalities between places and the challenges they face to being active? Will the national campaign reach, inspire and support the least active in tackling entrenched barriers? We have a wealth of insights on how these measures could be implemented and will continue to advocate the inclusion of lived experience in the evidence base to ensure needs are met. 

There are further opportunities for embedding movement into healthcare. The promised wave of Modern Service Frameworks for specific conditions will look at the best evidenced interventions; physical activity is a tool in the toolbox for many long-term conditions and should be woven through. Neighbourhood health centres – which my colleague Beth will soon discuss in a blog – offer a way to enact the place-based approaches to physical activity the plan recognises reduce inactivity. Personal health budgets already support many to be active and their expansion could enable even more. The development of a HealthStore for patients to access apps to manage their condition could include digital tools that support movement, including our own free and ORCHA-accredited We Are Undefeatable app, launching in September.  

The plan is just the start. We need to ensure the ambition is not only realised in implementation, but that it considers the breadth of the role physical activity has. Prevention is crucial, but there is more to do in managing, treating and rehabilitating long-term conditions through movement. Weight management is important, but not the only motivation or rationale for an active life. In ‘making healthy choices easy’, the system must help remove systemic barriers and inequalities to make it easier to sustain individual behaviour change.  

And that will be the focus of our work. We look forward to working with ministers, officials and colleagues across health and physical activity to get millions more moving.