Wes Streeting has denied his plans to give new weight-loss jabs to unemployed people to help them back into work would result in a “dystopian future” where overweight people would be “involuntarily jabbed”.
The UK health secretary acknowledged that weight-loss drugs were not, on their own, the answer to the nation’s obesity crisis after he suggested this week that they could have a “monumental” impact on getting more people working.
However, he told BBC One’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg show that the latest generation of drugs, such as semaglutide or tirzepatide, could be “gamechanging” when it came to reversing the trends in obesity.
Streeting had said in an article for the Telegraph that “widening waistbands” were placing a burden on the NHS, and the drugs could be administered to people to get them back into employment and to ease costs to the health service.
The government has announced a £279m investment from Lilly – the world’s largest pharmaceutical company – with the deal expected to include real-world trials of weight loss jabs’ impact on unemployment.
“I don’t think the answer to obesity is simply weight-loss jabs but there is a lot of evidence that these jabs, combined with changes to diet and exercise, can help people to reduce their weight to reduce cardiovascular disease but also diabetes, which is gamechanging,” Streeting said.
“They’re not the only solution, and I don’t want to create a dependency culture. I’m not interested in some dystopian future where I wander round … involuntarily jabbing unemployed people who are overweight – that is not the agenda.
“If we can throw the trends we’re seeing on obesity into reverse, that’s better for the health of the nation … and the nation’s finances, because we’ve got to shift from treating sickness to actively preventing it. But that’s not a substitute for good diet and nutrition and exercise.”
In a round of broadcast interviews, Streeting said he had reached a deal on NHS funding with the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, but could not fix the problems of the last 14 years in one budget.
He stressed the need for reform as well as investment in the NHS, saying he was “conscious” that money spent on health was money that could not be spent in other areas. He appeared to suggest that hospitals would have to improve productivity to benefit from additional funding.
“Certainly the approach that the chancellor and I are taking is to link investment to reform,” he told the BBC. Asked whether hospital trusts would be penalised if they did not “play ball”, he added: “We definitely need to manage performance.
“I think it’s a quid pro quo. It’s my responsibility to give system leaders the tools to do the job, and that’s my responsibility as secretary of state, but it’s their responsibility to deliver.”
Streeting also said he was boosting the number of NHS appointments, but did not have the exact data needed to see whether the government was on course to meet its pledges. He reiterated that the NHS could not be fixed without also addressing the social care crisis.
