There has been both excitement and anxiety around the transfer of public health to local government this month. Unfortunately the excitement has mainly been in local government and most of the anxiety in the public health world.

People working in sexual health have probably expressed more anxiety than most and they have raised two main concerns. While there are all real risks, there is also a great opportunity to build upon the successes of recent years and take a fresh look at problems where we have made less progress.

It is hard to challenge the idea that councils have better knowledge of and links to their local communities than public health departments in PCTs were ever able to develop. This is driven by the variety of ways in which councils touch people's lives and the political imperative to understand people's concerns and establish links with communities and community groups. Bringing the analytical rigour of public health professionals to bear on the information and insight councils have about their local populations is surely one of the great opportunities of the next few years.

While it is true that, across the country, PCTs invested resources in projects that might be harder to support in a more politicised environment, there is another side to this. A number of organisations with an interest in sexual health are getting increasingly sophisticated at using new technology to enable supporters to lobby councils and councillors around sexual health issues.

If we want to see positive political influence on sexual health commissioning then let's see organisations like Brook and the FPA, for example, empowering women of all ages to lobby local commissioners about the sort of access to contraception they want to see in their area.

We also need to be robust in areas where there may be controversy but we know what works. So for example for children and young people we know what leads to better sexual health. High aspirations, good sex and relationships education, confidential services and better links to areas like alcohol. If local commissioners want to do something different they need to be challenged to explain why their approach will be better for young people.

When it eventually came, the overall public health settlement was more generous than many imagined. Clarity over funding for two years and an increase in the global sum are to be welcomed.

However, by basing allocations to individual authorities on historic spend two different problems have been created. Areas like Waltham Forest where the investment in public health has been far too low under the PCT regime will have to wait years before their resources come up to the target.

At the same time authorities such as Hackney start off with a relatively high allocation but must take on new responsibilities in the knowledge that funding will be reduced over time. The fear is that limited resources will mean some of the vital information and prevention work will be the first thing to suffer.

Public health funding is notionally ringfenced but there is rightly a good deal of flexibility around how it is spent. In the context of massive reductions in local government resources there is a fear that councils will raid public health budgets to back fill gaps in other budgets. But the opposite can also be true and by moving public health into local government there is now potential access to a much larger set of resources to bring to bear on the public health challenges that face our community.

The Department of Health issued guidance on the role of directors of public health but local government has been clear that it wants the flexibility to develop public health leadership in different ways. So in Camden and Islington and Hackney, the City and Newham, for example, the approach will be to appoint shared directors.

It is absolutely vital that the public health teams in local authorities have clout and influence. It is also essential that they quickly develop relationships across the council and with the broader range of partners in their area that have a role to play in driving health improvement. It is the quality of these relationships, not who sits where or who reports to whom, that will drive real positive change in public health.

So there are huge challenges ahead but we have an opportunity to take sexual health into the mainstream. We need to talk more positively about sex and sexual health rather than always seeing it through the prism of exploitation or disease. We need to be honest that some of these challenges will be made that bit more difficult by the structural changes happening across health and social care but we should also seize the opportunities the new arrangements bring to secure better sexual health for everyone.

Jonathan McShane is the LGA's community wellbeing board lead member for sexual health

This article is published by Guardian Professional. Join the local government network to receive regular briefings and the latest job opportunities