Tackling Obesity

Tom Gordon Excerpts

Thursday 12th November 2026 Commons Chamber

[Layla Moran]

I am extremely grateful to the Committee member for his question—he is absolutely right. We had a roundtable with lived experience witnesses and they all said the same thing. Even though many had had aspects of treatment over the years and had tried every conceivable diet, what was disheartening was that they would go to their GP and face that wider stigma from the GP themselves, who would tell them that they just needed to tweak things in their modern life. It just does not work that way. Naming it as a relapsing-remitting condition, putting it up there as the public health challenge it is and focusing in on it in the way that we are so good at doing when we want to in this House is the answer—I completely agree with him.

[Tom Gordon (Harrogate and Knaresborough) (LD)]

I was pleased to see the wealth of experience that the Select Committee drew upon, including from organisations such as Diabetes UK and Yorkshire Cancer Research. The report asks for a target to cut obesity. That is welcome, but does my hon. Friend the Chair of the Select Committee agree that we need to have additional sub-targets and metrics to ensure that progress is equal across all our regions, because we know a north-south divide still exists and there are persistent issues when it comes to health inequalities, including obesity?

[Layla Moran]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his point. He is exactly right that there is a huge disparity. We know that healthy food is too often out of reach for those on the poorest incomes, especially so when it comes to children, and that is not reflected currently. That is what we hope the modern service framework might start from—how we close that patchwork of services across the country and make inequality one of the core missions of this Government through this policy.