A year ago the Government was telling us that the annual cost of obesity was around £5bn. Specialists who had a better grip on the overall economic consequences of the issue were working to a figure of between £25 – £30bn. In November, however, the "true" figure of £47bn was published by the internationally respected consultancy, McKinsey Global Institute. It caught everyone on the hop. It was an alarm call and, crucially, government did not dispute the figures. In the run up to the General Election, every politician aspiring to power should wake up to the fact that that by 2030, 50% of the UK could obese if nothing serious is done in 2015. McKinsey spelt out that most of the measures so far implemented to tackle obesity this century have not worked: most but not all.

Those that have worked should immediately be given a new lease of life and that means restoring the original School Sports Partnerships programmes. But SSPs are now not enough if we are to get children anywhere near back in shape. The December figures for the National Child Measurement Programme [NCMP] proved that obesity is increasing once again and that, in many areas of the country, the situation is dire. The number of obese children at Year 6 is over twice the number at Reception and the rate of obesity in the most deprived UK areas is, again, twice the rate of the least deprived.

It's time to get back to basics and to a time long ago when physical exercise/sport was an everyday activity alongside the three Rs. No longer can PE be a paltry two hours per week – the current government recommendation - or even an "aspiration" of more. Given that children need a minimum of one hour of meaningful exercise a day, but are not getting it when left to their own or their parents devices, schools must step in and ensure that they get at least half the recommended amount.

How that might be achieved is being trialled in Hull. Short, sharp PE sessions in breaks between classes are in the curriculum from the beginning of the Spring term at the city's AshworthAcademy. "SNAP" – the Schools and National Anti-Obesity Programme - is a daily workout schedule delivering PE to children 3½ hours a week and demonstrating that supervised activity does not have to be confined to a single lesson but can woven into the daily fabric of school life. The activities have been designed particularly to engage children who are normally turned off any form of traditional sport but can still enjoy the exercises - squats, press-ups, lunges, burpees and the like. If the 6-week trial is successful, head teacher Mike Birkinshaw intends that his product gets rolled out across the country. "We have already introduced healthier lunch options to combat obesity but it isn't enough" says a man who feels that schools have this kind of duty of care and is well aware that fitter kids are better behaved and better able to learn in class.

Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson, Britain's supreme paralympian, should be right behind Mr Birkinshaw's initiative. In a commissioned report for the Welsh Assembly being studied in Cardiff she has also made the recommendation that physical activity should be a core curriculum subject. In fact she was so adamant that this response was required to tackle obesity and get Welsh children up and running that she made it her report's sole recommendation. "Unless we make sport and physical activity a core subject", she stated, "we will be still be here in 20 years time having made little or no progress ". She put a cost of a mere £5m per annum to the initiative, peanuts when considering the cost that inactivity triggers. Unbelievably, when she brought her idea to a Westminster All-Party Parliamentary Commission on Physical Activity in the Autumn, it appears to have got short shrift. Although the House of Lords Select Committee on Olympic and Paralympic Legacy had already supported her thinking, the Commission preferred only to come out with 4 ideas for creating an "active school", ideas that were distinctly unoriginal and unworthy of the time that it took to come up with them.

However, Grey-Thompson's thinking should be seriously studied by the House of Commons Health Select Committee in January and February. The Committee is holding an Inquiry into the impact of physical activity and diet on health and should know full well what the ravages of inactivity are. The tragedy is that this is not first time that it has looked at the severely limited amount of PE in schools. In 2004 the Committee sitting under a Labour administration stated that, given the threat of obesity to the current generation, provision should be a minimum of three hours. It recognised that relentless pressure on the curriculum was serving to squeeze out school sport but reminded government that many independent schools not only could find the that time but also offered four hours or more. The government promptly ignored the advice. The 2015 Inquiry should repeat the call that its predecessor made.

Integrating physical activity/sport into every school day exercise might also rescue the Olympic Legacy from disappearing from sight. Sebastian Coe, now bidding to become President of the International Amateur Athletics Federation, should be well pleased with that. He has recently reiterated the place of school PE in fostering a critical mass of active people who might then progress to becoming the elite athletes of the future. He resigned as the Olympic legacy ambassador through his regret that school sport had become a political football during the 2012 Games and has called for a 10yr plan, that now has to be spearheaded by others, to get school sport out of critical care. As IAAF President he will have plenty of clout to help them on their way.

Footnote: Though the state of fitness in our armed forces is not yet a national emergency, the MOD is worried enough about the problem to set up its "obesity working group" to work out how to tackle its fat troops. One wonders how serving military personnel can be allowed to get so out of shape and the perhaps the generals should pay a visit to Hull. Never mind having to cope with the 25,000 serving men and women who have been diagnosed as obese over the past four years, they apparently have the equally difficult task of finding fit school recruits to replace those that have to be discharged.

Tam Fry is spokesperson for the National Obesity Forum