Obesity: Children

(asked on 7th May 2024) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment she has made of trends in childhood obesity levels in (a) Coventry North East constituency, (b) Coventry, (c) the West Midlands and (d) England in each of the last three years.


Answered by
Andrea Leadsom Portrait
Andrea Leadsom
This question was answered on 15th May 2024

The National Child Measurement Programme (NCMP) collects data on children aged four to five years old, who would be in reception, and 10 to 11 years old, who would be in year 6. It provides detailed trend data on children’s weight status, including childhood obesity. While data is not available at a constituency level, it is available at a local authority, regional, and national level. The following table shows the obesity prevalence from the NCMP in Coventry, the West Midlands, and England, for 2019/20, 2020/21, 2021/22 and 2022/23:

Area

Children aged four to five years old

Children aged 10 to 11 years old

2019/20

2020/21

2021/22

2022/23

2019/20

2020/21

2021/22

2022/23

Coventry

11.7%

15.2%

10.4%

9.8%

25.3%

30.2%

26.7%

25.6%

West Midlands

11.2%

16%

11.3%

10.1%

23.9%

28.4%

26.2%

25.2%

England

9.9%

14.4%

10.1%

9.2%

21%

25.5%

23.4%

22.7%

Note: the data for 2019/20 was collected before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The data shows that the prevalence of obesity in children aged four to five years old has decreased since the increase seen in 2020/21, during the COVID-19 pandemic. For children aged 10 to 11 years old, prevalence has decreased, but it still remains higher in 2022/23 compared to pre-pandemic levels in 2019/20, for the West Midlands and England. For Coventry, however, prevalence in 2022/23 is similar to pre-pandemic levels in 2019/20.

Reticulating Splines