The weight-loss drug Mounjaro is being rolled out to a “woefully small number of people” on the NHS, MPs have said.

Only around 6 per cent of eligible patients will receive Mounjaro (a GLP-1 weight-loss drug) in its first three years on the NHS, according to the Commons health and social care committee, which said the plans were “unambitious”.

The committee’s MPs also used a report to call for obesity to be treated as a long-term, managed condition, similarly to diabetes.

They warned that a “two-tier system” had developed for access to drugs, with millions who could afford to do so turning to private firms, worsening existing health inequality.

The MPs said: “The Government must urgently reassess the pace of rollout of Mounjaro. This should include making better use of the capacity of digital providers.

“As a first step, the department should hold a summit on GLP-1 access with a range of providers and healthcare professionals to open a dialogue on how best to improve the rollout.”

Semaglutide, marketed as Wegovy, was approved on the NHS for obese people in 2022, though many obtain their prescriptions privately because of difficulty accessing it through GPs.

In June 2024, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) recommended Mounjaro as an option for managing obesity.

The NHS estimated 2.8 million patients would be eligible, and if they all presented within the first year, the cost would be £15.2bn over five years.

The committee said Nice had therefore agreed to NHS England’s request that Mounjaro be rolled out gradually.

The NHS has given access to 220,000 people over three years. The Health Foundation, the charity think tank, says this is around 6 per cent of those who are eligible based on Nice’s recommendations.

In their report on obesity, MPs said a new framework was needed to “include ambitious targets for the proportion of a local population that should be able to access GLP-1s”.

More than 2.37 million packs of GLP-1s were prescribed every month in the UK, “with the vast majority of these being accessed privately”, the report said.

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