UK government likely to miss its target to reduce childhood obesity

Confusion among local professionals over the best way to tackle child obesity is threatening the UK government's target of halting the increase in the condition by 2010, a report by three influential public watchdogs has warned.

A joint study by the Audit Commission, the Healthcare Commission, and the National Audit Office notes that two years after the announcement of the target, to stop the rise in obesity in children under 11, there has been little action on the ground.

Obesity in 2-10 year olds in the United Kingdom rose from 9.9% to 13.7% between 1995 and 2003, said the Audit Commission's chief executive, Steve Bundred. If present trends continue, the next generation will have a shorter life expectancy than their parents.

The government's plans to tackle the problem were “very complex and ambitious,” involving changing the behaviour and lifestyle of about a million children and their parents as well as close coordination between many different departments. But so far, says the report, little evidence indicates that the 20 different programmes to improve children's health and nutrition will encourage obese children to eat more healthily or exercise more.

The report is particularly critical of the lack of central guidance, which has meant that organisations have been unclear about their roles and that staff on the ground “may be wasting resources on ineffective or inappropriate interventions that fail to target those children most at risk.”

The Department of Health produced guidance in early January on how schoolchildren should be measured and weighed, with the aim of producing reliable baseline data as well as identifying where resources need to be targeted. Further advice on helping obese children is due later in the year.

Figure 1.

Mark Davis, the director of cross government studies at the National Audit Office, said that the big question was whether existing initiatives could really identify and target the children who were most at risk: “For instance, having more playing fields may just appeal to the children who like sport rather than the overweight ones.”