LONDON, ENGLAND - Dangerously overweight children may be taken from their families and put into care if Britain's obesity epidemic continues to escalate, British newspapers yesterday quoted council chiefs as saying.

One million children will be clinically obese within four years if current trends continue, The Independent reported.

The Local Government Association (LGA) - which represents 400 councils in England and Wales - argued that parents who allowed their children to eat too much could be as guilty of neglect as those who did not feed their children at all, according to TimesOnline.

Social workers are rarely involved in such cases, considering the issue as one best tackled by parents. But the association predicted that social services would have to intervene 'more and more' with obese children, with the ultimate sanction of taking the fattest boys and girls into care, the newspapers said.

There have been some reported cases where children under 10 have weighed up to 89kg.

Mr David Rogers, LGA's spokesman on public health, said that by 2025, about a quarter of all boys would be grossly overweight.

Britain is fast becoming the 'obesity capital of the world' and the increasing weight of the average citizen was pushing up council tax bills, the LGA said.

The costs come from the need for bigger classroom furniture, canteens and gymnasiums to cope with larger pupils.

Crematoria furnaces are being widened at a cost of tens of thousands of pounds for heavier corpses.

Standard coffins are 40 to 50cm wide, but coffins twice that size are being ordered to fit larger bodies

Ambulances are being re-equipped with extra-wide and strengthened stretchers and winches. Fire services are called in to winch obese people out of dangerous buildings.

Homes run by the local authorities are being adapted for the overweight.

Social services costs are also rising due to caring for house-bound people suffering from conditions caused by obesity such as heart disease and diabetes.

Mr Rogers said: 'If parents place children at risk through bad diet and lack of exercise, is it right for a council to keep the child's health under review?... There needs to be a national debate about the extent to which it is acceptable for the local authorities to take action in cases where the children's welfare is in jeopardy.'

The Government faced criticism this month after it announced plans to warn parents if their child has a weight problem. It has banned the use of the word 'obese' to be used in letters after research showed people find it 'highly offensive', The Independent reported.

The Conservative Party said that taking children into care was a serious step. Mr Andrew Landsley, the Shadow Health Secretary, said that in many cases 'it would be better to help the parents provide better nutrition for their child rather than break up the family', TimesOnline reported.

This article was first published in The Sunday Times on August 17, 2008.