A government-funded project that promised ground-breaking research into the early detection and treatment of anorexia has been frozen because of the NHS funding crisis.

Ministers awarded the £2 million grant, the first large-scale clinical study on eating disorders, last spring, saying that research was crucial to address a dearth of knowledge about eating disorders.

About one in a hundred teenagers aged 16 to 18 has anorexia - an increase of 40 per cent since 1990.

The cash was given to the Maudsley Hospital in southeast London, in partnership with Beat, the eating disorders charity, and the Institute of Psychiatry. Trials of new treatments and diagnostic techniques were ready to start in hospitals across the county in April.

The Times has learnt, however, that financial problems across the NHS have prevented the hospital trusts from supplying the nurses and clinical staff needed to run the project.

Usually there is an understanding that if a research institute is awarded funding, the clinical resources to carry out the work are made available. However, many trusts have freezes on staff recruitment, and existing staff cannot be spared for the research programme.

The Department of Health said that there was no excuse for delay since mechanisms were in place to ensure that adequate staff were made available for important research projects, from which everyone benefited. A spokeswoman said: “Our aim is to ensure that patients and healthcare professionals from all parts of England, and from all areas of healthcare, are able to participate in and benefit from clinical research. There are a number of funding mechanisms in place to support R&D activity in primary care, as well as ad hoc funding mechanisms to address particular local difficulties.”

She said that the parties involved had not alerted the department to problems with this grant.

The multi-strand project plans to come up with new methods of diagnosing eating disorders more swiftly and, crucially, explore new treatments for sufferers who do not respond to current therapies. It also plans to develop and evaluate a web-based self-assessment tool and cognitive behaviour therapy for people with anorexia.

Another strand will examine how mothers with eating disorders can minimise the impact on their children.

When the funding was announced, Ulrike Schmidt, consultant psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital and Professor of Eating Disorders at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London, predicted that it would revolutionise treatment. “In five years we hope to have new treatments for anorexia that make a lasting and positive difference to sufferers and their families,” he said at the time.

Susan Ringwood, the chief executive of Beat, said that she was very frustrated that the project had still not got under way. “The grant was agreed in February and we could have started in April, at the beginning of the financial year,” she said.

“It is very frustrating that we have lost six months already. Our website gets three million hits a month so we are very eager to discover how the internet can be used in the best way to help to diagnose and treat eating disorders, because the internet can be a danger to vulnerable girls as well as a help.”

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— The number of public health staff working in the NHS has been more than halved under Labour, according to figures obtained by the Conservatives. In 1997 there were 3,167 nonconsultant public health staff, including nurses, nursing assistants and other support workers. By 2006 this had fallen to 1,362, a cut of 1,805, or 57 per cent. The number of public health consultants rose by 10 per cent during the same period.

The figures came in response to parliamentary questions from Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Health Secretary. “When Gordon Brown pledged to increase spending on the NHS, he signed up to a plan that called for a greater priority for public health – but then he failed to implement it,” he said. “At a time when obesity rates, sexually transmitted infections and levels of substance misuse are all rising, this lack of priority given to public health is unforgivable and misguided.

“Unless there is a dramatic change, taxpayers will have to pay £30 billion more each year by the early 2020s.”

Mr Lansley cited a warning in 2002 by Sir Derek Wanless, the former government adviser, that a failure to tackle public health challenges would require additional NHS spending of £30 billion a year by 2022.

He branded Labour’s record on public health “abject”, noting that the number of overweight or obese boys aged under 15 had increased by 33 per cent since 1997 and girls by 27 per cent. Cases of gonorrhoea had risen by 44 per cent, chlamydia 148 per cent, herpes 17 per cent, and HIV by 111 per cent. Alcohol-related deaths had increased by 40 per cent and the number of young people receiving hospital treatment for alcohol misuse by 33 per cent. Smoking rates had also fallen more slowly since 1997, Mr Lansley said.

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