Law, health and planning: Using Health Impact Assessments to improve urban health

Local government urban planners can lack legal capacity to promote healthy urban developments. This means, for example,they can lack confidence, resource or knowledge that would help them use the law to promote health; to reduce the risks of noncommunicable diseases (including poor mental health) and reduce health inequalities. This lack of capacity undermines their ability to effectively incorporate health into decisions about individual applications and ensure that health is given due weight in urban decision making.