NCCH Honorary President

The Rt Hon. Lord Howarth of Newport has been Schools Minister, Minister for the Arts, Minister for Higher Education and Science and Minister for Employment, Equal Opportunities and Disabled People. A Member of the House of Commons between 1983 and 2005, he provided leadership for the field of creative health since he was Minister for the Arts in the Blair government. He instigated joint working between the Department for Health and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport which supported the integration of high quality art and design into the building of new hospitals in the 2000s. Following his appointment to the House of Lords in 2005 and worked with the then Secretary of State for Health, Alan Johnson, to secure his support for ongoing developments which included the joint publication of A Prospectus for Arts and Health in 2008, led by Arts Council England and the Department of Health.

In 2014, Lord Howarth set up the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Arts, Health and Wellbeing (APPG AHW) and chaired the 2015-2017 national inquiry which resulted in the report: Creative Health: The Arts for Health and Wellbeing, which was launched in the House of Commons in July 2017. The recommendations led to the establishment of the NCCH as a charity in 2020 and the public launch of the organisation in March 2021.

Lord Howarth became NCCH’s founding Chair for its first four years, during which time NCCH made significant progress in fulfilling its mission to advance good practice and research, inform policy and promote collaboration, helping foster the conditions for creative health to be integral to health and social care and wider systems. Major developments included the Arts Council England funded Creative Health Associates programme, working closely with Integrated Care Systems across England; the £30 million UKRI funded research programme Mobilising Community Assets to Tackle Health Inequalities; and the Creative Health Review, How Policy Can Embrace Creative Health, published in December 2023 by NCCH and the APPG AHW. The Creative Health Review was Chaired by Lord Howarth as Co-Chair of the APPG AHW.