Calls to overhaul NHS spending to fund weight-loss jabs for millions

Ministers should overhaul the NHS spending watchdog to enable millions more people to be put on weight-loss jabs, Tony Blair’s think tank has said.

Experts are calling for the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice), which decides which drugs the NHS should buy, to start factoring in the wider economic benefits of medication rather than just their health effect.

The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) has calculated that giving weight-loss jabs such as Mounjaro and Wegovy to 15 million eligible overweight adults would save the economy £52 billion in the long term. By cutting rates of illnesses such as heart disease, people would stay in work for longer, saving billions of pounds in benefit payments and increasing tax revenues.

There are 15 million obese adults in the UK who could benefit from weight-loss jabs but the NHS is embarking on a rollout of Mounjaro, offering it to just 220,000 people over three years. The NHS has said it cannot afford a mass introduction.

Dr Charlotte Refsum, the director of health policy at TBI, said Nice should consider “the wider economic benefit of medications because a healthy working-age population drives economic growth”. She added: “Prevention should be part of the Treasury’s growth agenda and Nice’s remit should be expanded to consider the macroeconomic benefits of medicines, including anti-obesity drugs.”

Read full story (paywalled)

Source: The Times, 19 September 2025