Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how much his Department spends on (a) bariatric surgery for obesity and (b) lifestyle intervention programmes.

Information about National Health Service spending on bariatric surgery is available from reference costs, which are the average cost to NHS trusts and NHS foundation trusts for providing defined services in a given financial year to NHS patients. Reference costs for acute care are collected by Healthcare Resource Groups (HRGs), which are standard groupings of clinically similar treatments that consume common levels of healthcare resource. The HRGs in the attached table are specific to bariatric surgery.

Source: Reference costs, Department of Health

Notes:

Data includes the cost of procedures performed in day case, ordinary elective, non-elective and outpatient settings. Other costs outside of these settings are not included.

We have given local authorities a budget of £8.2 billion over three years to help them manage public health issues including lifestyle intervention programmes including NHS Health Checks and the National Child Measurement Programme.

In addition, Public Health England runs a range of well-known marketing programmes such as Change4Life, Smokefree, Be Clear on Cancer and, most recently, Dementia Friends. These deliver positive health outcomes, such as reducing adult smoking prevalence and increasing early diagnosis of cancer. These marketing programmes utilise behavioural science, commercial best practice and digital tools to engage hundreds of thousands of people. The total core marketing budget for 2014-2015 is £53 million.