Lisa Cameron – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lisa Cameron on 2016-09-02.
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what estimate he has made of the cost to the (a) NHS, (b) social care sector and (c) economy of obesity in each of the last five years.
Nicola Blackwood
The economic burden of ill health due to diet, physical inactivity, smoking, alcohol and obesity in the UK: an update to 2006-07 NHS costs estimated that overweight and obesity cost the National Health Service in the United Kingdom £5.1 billion per year. This figure was uplifted to £6.1 billion in 2014-15 to take account of inflation.
The Foresight team published Tackling Obesities: Future Choices in 2007. This estimated the annual costs of overweight and obesity to society and the economy as £27 billion in 2015, based on obesity prevalence at the time. More recently the McKinsey Global Institute estimated the cost of obesity to the UK economy as £46 billion per year.
No further estimates have been made centrally.
Copies of The economic burden of ill health due to diet, physical inactivity, smoking, alcohol and obesity in the UK: an update to 2006-07 NHS costs; Tackling Obesities: Future Choices; and the McKinsey Global Institute’s report Overcoming obesity: An initial economic analysis are available at:
http://jpubhealth.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/05/11/pubmed.fdr033.full.pdf+html
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