Last night’s Tonight programme revisited a group of bingo workers in Oldham twelve months on from their original cash for weight loss incentive experiment. In the original programme, the workers were divided into two teams – blue and red – with the red team being offered the incentive of £10 for every 1% of their body weight lost and the blue team having no incentive other than achieving weight loss for themselves.

In the recap of the original show, we saw how the red team originally lost more weight than the blue team, however, throughout last night’s show, we saw how Professor Paul Gatley – who oversaw the experiment – spent a lot of time with the red team and encouraged them into doing various forms of exercise while the blue team seemed to have just been getting on with it on their own…

At the end of the experiment last year, the red team had lost more weight overall than the blue team so they won a total of £240 between them, however, a year on, when the cash incentive was no longer a factor and Paul Gatley wasn’t on hand to motivate them, most of the red team had put the weight back on but the blue team had consistently continued to lose weight.

We saw too how this experiment began originally in America and also how one company over there – where around 75% of the work force was obese – had embraced the idea and offered cash prizes to its workers for weight loss.

However, the main message that came through loud and clear both here in the UK and in America was that those losing weight because of the cash incentive rapidly put it back on when the cash stopped.

Nonetheless, given that obesity in this country is becoming an ever more onerous burden on the NHS and the economy in general, a pilot scheme is being run in Kent to replicate this experiment and we heard that if it’s successful there, it could be rolled out to the rest of the country.

It was briefly mentioned in the programme that many will think this is “rewarding” people who’re overweight but it wasn’t really discussed in depth. I think this issue, if the programme were to be nationwide, will cause problems. For instance, where’s the money coming from to fund this? Will smokers or people with alcohol or drug addictions be offered cash to give up and if not, why not?

I can easily imagine this becoming a very contentious issue in the same way that the recent announcements that some airlines are considering ‘taxing’ overweight customers has been. In that instance, overweight people will be penalised financially because of their weight whereas of course for the NHS trial, overweight people will be financially rewarded for – arguably – being overweight in the first place.

So what do you think? Should this cash for weight loss plan become a feature of the NHS or is it unfairly diverting money away from other services and effectively rewarding people for being obese?