AROUND £4.8m is likely to be slashed from funding to help people in the county lose weight and quit smoking, the Daily Echo can reveal.

The Government is poised to cut each local council’s public health budget by 7.8 per cent immediately, in the first round of George Osborne’s post-election cuts.

The move will swipe cash for services such as smoking cessation classes, obesity clinics, school nurses and drug and alcohol treatments.

And it will go ahead despite warnings of an obesity epidemic and evidence that tackling the stubborn causes of ill-health can cut the long-term cost to the health service.

As part of £30bn of projected cuts planned by 2018, the Chancellor announced a £200m “in-year” cut to public health budgets earlier this month, but did not set out where the pain would fall.

Now the Daily Echo has been told that three options will be set out, possibly as early as this week: They include a 7.8 per cent cut “across-the-board”, steeper cuts for councils deemed to be historically overfunded and taking the entire £200m from local authorities yet to spend the money and with reserves.

Daily Echo:

The across-the-board cut would take around £1.2m from Southampton City Council, a further £3.1m from Hampshire County Council and about £500,000 from the Isle of Wight.

However, the second option would probably spare Hampshire, because it is areas with large numbers of pensioners are considered underfunded by the Department of Health (DH).

The British Medical Association (BMA) has already accused the Government of “crude cost-cutting at the expense of the public’s health”.

Iain Kennedy, chairman of its public health medicine committee, saying a third of Britons are projected to be obese by 2030 while 70 children a day smoke their first cigarettes and the total cost of alcohol harm is estimated to stand at £20bn.

A DH spokeswoman said the consultation would be launched soon, adding: “We will be asking authorities for their views on the best way to make these reductions, to minimise disruption.”

Budgets for public health were transferred from the NHS to local authorities in 2013, when ministers argued – ironically - that the funds had often been “raided” by the NHS.

Dave Shields, Labour cabinet member for health services at the city council, said funding for health and social care was already “inadequate” and that further cuts would leave the council facing a “difficult” position.

He said: “We are told everywhere that we need to relieve the pressure on the NHS but the next moment we are hearing they are cutting the money for doing that.

“It’s something we could have done without on top of everything else to have to face.

“We need to ensure what little money we have got will achieve the best outcomes but it’s hard - what’s more important, tackling obesity or stopping people smoking?

“Whatever choice we make will be unpopular somewhere.”