Wes Streeting has insisted he isn’t pushing a “dystopian” plan to force overweight unemployed workers to take weight loss jabs.
The Health Secretary said a new trial to test the effectiveness of injections to get people back to work could be a “game changer”. But he said weight loss jabs were not the only solution to obesity – and no substitute for changes to diet and exercise.
It comes as researchers are set to look into the “real-world effectiveness” of the anti-obesity treatment Mounjaro, also known as tirzepatide, on driving down worklessness over five years. A study by Health Innovation Manchester and pharmaceutical giant Lilly will look at the impact of jabs on getting people back into work and the impact on the NHS.
Speaking to the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Mr Streeting said: “I’m also not interested in some dystopian future where I wander around involuntarily jabbing unemployed people who are overweight. That is not the agenda.
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“Actually, I think we’ve got an opposite challenge. I think demand at the moment will be greater than what we’re able to meet. So that’s the challenge we’ve got. But this could be game changing, and if we can throw the trends we’re seeing in obesity into reverse, that’s better for the health of the nation.”
Mr Streeting said there was evidence to show these jabs could help people to lose weight and reduce the risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes. He added: “For a lot of people, particularly people who are morbidly obese, they will tell you through bitter experience, even when they have tried to do the right thing, they find the challenge insurmountable.” But he said it wasn’t the only solution – and he didn’t want to create “a dependency culture”.
It comes as he suggested hospitals will have to make improvements to productivity to benefit from additional cash. Mr Streeting said: “Certainly the approach that the Chancellor and I are taking is to link investment to reform.”
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.
“We’re a team, we’ve got to work in partnership, and the way I’m thinking about the reform agenda and how we go about it and how we involve the NHS staff in it, is a team effort.”