Big Way Of Life

A scheme to measure obesity in children could become a casualty of the Coalition's drive to improve public health, experts fear.

From 2013 funding for the National Child Measurement Programme, which weighs children the year they enter primary school and the year they leave, pass to local authorities.

But public health experts are worried that some local authorities will stop funding the scheme because they will have more pressing things to pay for.

Alan Maryon-Davis, honorary professor of public health at Kings College London, said: "I really worry about the amount of funding that will get passed to the local level."

Public Health England, a new body which will start operating in 2013 with a £4 billion budget, will have a myriad of national responsibilities such as those currently carried out by the Health Protection Agency, he said.

"What's left will get handed to the local authorities for their health and wellbeing programmes.

"£4bn for Public Health England sounds like a huge amount, but once you start totting up the thing that have to be done at a national level, who knows how much will be left?

"The future of the National Child Management Programme will depend on whether or not there will be any central directive to ensure local authorities carry on with it.

"If it's left to local public health directors I do worry that it will be a very very patchy thing.

"Some will go along with it, but other will say 'Let's do away with it, we need to pay for meals-on-wheels.'

"There needs to be a strong local directive because it has been great in providing very useful date on a big, big problem: childhood obesity."

He said the scheme, which has been running since 2005, was useful because it gave information on which areas had the biggest childhood obesity problems.

A spokesman for the Department of Health said the Government was "committed" to the programme and was "exploring" how it would be delivered from 2013.

She said: "As set out in the Public Health White Paper, the Government is committed to the National Child Measurement Programme.

"It will continue to be used as a vital source of information to inform policy and local service commissioning.

"We are currently exploring how the National Child Measurement Programme will be best delivered through the new public health system."