England's Children Are Getting Weight-Loss Jabs — and the Real Numbers Are Almost Certainly Higher

NHS data shows 419 GLP-1 prescriptions for under-18s in 2024-25, with private clinics untracked. The gap between clinical need and long-term safety data is widening fast.

Hundreds of children in England are receiving prescriptions for GLP-1 medications — the same class of drugs behind Wegovy and Mounjaro — including at least 10 children under 12 in the 2024-25 financial year. A Guardian FOI request to the NHS Business Services Authority revealed 419 prescriptions to under-18s that year, with 341 more in just the first four months of 2025-26, 15 of those for children under 12. The trajectory is accelerating.

These figures almost certainly undercount the real picture. They exclude private prescriptions, hospital dispensing, and prison settings. One private children's clinic alone has disclosed more than 200 patients on the jabs. The NHS data captures community-dispensed prescriptions only — the visible fraction of a larger, harder-to-measure phenomenon. The clinical rationale is not trivial. Childhood obesity in England is severe and worsening: 10.7% of reception-year children (ages 4-5) are obese, rising to 22.8% by year 6 (ages 10-11). Globally, the WHO reports 400 million children aged 5-19 were overweight in 2024, with 170 million living with obesity. The NHS has been piloting Complications from Excess Weight clinics since 2021 for children aged 2-16 with severe obesity, and nearly 6,500 children have been referred. Clinicians describe patients with type 2 diabetes, sleep apnoea, liver disease, and intracranial hypertension — children who have failed conventional dietary and psychological support. The doctors making these prescriptions are emphatic about the stakes. Julian Hamilton-Shield, a professor of metabolic endocrinology at the Bristol CEW clinic, describes children with morbid-level obesity from complex backgrounds, not attending school, bearing enormous stigma. He reports weight losses of 25-30kg giving children their first sense of agency. Dunia Ismail, a consultant paediatrician running a CEW clinic, is blunt: without intervention, these children face early heart disease, diabetes, and premature death. Novo Nordisk trial data on 165 children aged 6-12 showed 40% achieved BMI below the obesity threshold with semaglutide. But the long-term safety picture for growing bodies remains thin. Martin Whyte, a professor of metabolic medicine at the University of Surrey, flags the known rebound problem — weight typically returns when the drugs stop — and the limited data on years-long use in children still going through puberty. He insists on specialist monitoring of growth, nutrition, mental health, eating behaviours, and side effects. The WHO's new global guidelines, issued last month, draw a line at age 10: no GLP-1s for children younger than that. English CEW clinics are now discussing lowering their own threshold from 12 to 8. The structural tension is clear. Pharmaceutical companies — led by Novo Nordisk, which produces both Wegovy and Victoza and funded the child trial — stand to gain enormously from expanding the eligible population downward in age. The NHS specialist clinic infrastructure is limited; only some CEW clinics can even access GLP-1 funding. Meanwhile, private clinics operate with less oversight, and the FOI data doesn't reach them at all. The system is building dependency on expensive, ongoing pharmaceutical interventions for a condition driven largely by food environments, poverty, and systemic failures in public health. Nobody disputes these children are suffering. The question is whether the response — prescribing drugs with limited paediatric long-term data, funded partly by the companies that profit from lifelong use — builds genuine resilience or creates a new dependency loop. The honest answer is: we don't know yet, and the prescriptions are outpacing the evidence.