The postcode lottery for weight loss jabs could hand Makerfield to Reform | LBC

If Makerfield swings Reform, it will do so from its sick bed. Wes Streeting said Labour must be bolder to regain the trust of voters – this must start with their health.

The board controlling Greater Manchester’s NHS services has pulled up the drawbridge for weight loss jabs, cutting out thousands from treatment. New local restrictions, far stricter than the national guidance sets out, mean only the most obese patients who also have several other health problems can access them. But this is a political choice, not just a clinical one. People who are sick, in pain, or written off don’t feel they have a stake in the system – that’s when they vote for change.

We saw the consequences play out earlier this month at the local elections. Overstretched NHS boards in Kent and West Yorkshire have cut referrals to weight loss drug semaglutide by 95% since June 2025, the very month Wes Streeting – the Health Secretary at the time – set out his vision to make Britain “fat free within a decade”. These areas saw huge swings to Reform in the local elections. The cost of living, crumbling public services, crime, distrust in Westminster – poor health doesn’t sit alongside those grievances. It feeds them.

Obesity is a complex disease. Not just in how it develops – so much more than a matter of eating too much or moving too little – but also in its devastating impact on the people living with it. Obesity too often means diabetes, heart disease, disability, chronic pain, depression, and a multitude of other health problems that make work and life almost impossible. Each of these generates their own GP appointments, A&E visits and days off work.

There’s no doubt now that weight loss jabs work – our latest data shows they cut sick days and GP visits in half. That’s why Wes Streeting put them at the heart of his 10 Year Health Plan. Yet fewer than 1% of the 3.4 million people in England eligible for the jabs can access them, with the numbers much worse in the poorest areas.

You can’t doubt that DHSC had a vision – but its botched local delivery is yet another betrayal for communities who for years have been left with a system that waits until people are much sicker before it acts.

The new Health Secretary must treat prevention as a priority, not a principle to promise in speeches but undermine in practice. That means tackling the postcode lottery that leaves people eligible for treatment under national criteria but blocked by local restrictions.

It means standardising access across every NHS board and expanding routes into care through GPs, community services, and digital delivery via mobile phones. Treatment should be available to those who need it most, not to those who can pay their way.

But it’s also not enough to just hand out medication and hope. The weight loss jab rollout will only work long-term when delivered with proper, wraparound support – accessible, verified information and regular consultations with nurses and dietitians.

More and more medicines will be invented that could ease NHS pressure at scale and keep people in work and in health. If the Government cannot make this one work – where the evidence of impact is so clear – it will struggle to act on any of them.

Every month of delay means more preventable illness, more pressure on the NHS and more people written off before they had the chance to recover. That is avoidable decline, and the country deserves better.

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Martin Fidock is the UK Managing Director of Oviva.

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