£10bn a year...cost of sickness benefits linked to obesity

BENEFIT payments for obesityrelated sickness are costing taxpayers £10billion a year, a study states.

- Steph Spyro

Tens of thousands more people would be prescribed weight loss medicine on the NHS if the full impact of the costs were considered, consultancy LCP has argued.

Ministers are being urged to ditch "gimmicks and soundbites" and find a fix for the obesity crisis.

John O'Connell, chief executive of the TaxPayers' Alliance, said: "The cost of sickness benefits to taxpayers has become completely unsustainable in recent years.

"There is now a genuinely urgent need for a solution which goes beyond gimmicks and soundbites and doesn't simply involve throwing more money at a problem in the hope that it will go away.