Reeves pressed to invest in people as well as projects – and get more bang for her buck

The chancellor is being encouraged to factor better public health into her spending plans, but the OBR also needs to think longer term

- Rachel Sylvester Political Editor

A couple of years ago the food campaigner Henry Dimbleby was surprised to receive a phone call out of the blue inviting him to the Treasury. Jeremy Hunt was chancellor at the time and his officials were keen to discuss the economic impact of diet-related ill health.

They had been shocked, they explained, to discover the extent to which long-term worklessness was driven by conditions associated with obesity. The chancellor wanted to do something about it but first he needed to persuade the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) that any money spent would be a good investment. "They said: 'The problem is, we think that the evidence that is already out there massively understates the real harms to the NHS and the economy and, therefore, we can't submit that to the OBR. But we cannot commission the research'" the businessman recalls.

It was agreed that Dimbleby would find someone to do the economic analysis that could then be used by the Treasury to put pressure on the OBR. He persuaded the Tony Blair Institute to fund Frontier Economics to carry out the work, which concluded that the total cost of obesity had reached £98bn, allowing the chancellor's team to make its case. "That just seems to me a completely mad way of working out how you're going to spend your scarce resources trying to improve anything about the nation," Dimbleby says.

There is, in his view, a wider – and ongoing - issue that the Treasury too often seems to understand the price of everything and the value of nothing. "The underlying culture is 'why are these bastards trying to waste taxpayers' money?' That's not a bad culture to have in the one department that's trying to control spending but it does mean it becomes quite bean-countery. If you measure everything in terms of products and services then you don't value the things which are most important in life, which are nature and human wellbeing. That is deeply problematic."