Sugary Drinks Tax

Debate between John Glen and Philippa Whitford

Monday 30th November 2015 Westminster Hall

[Dr Philippa Whitford (Central Ayrshire) (SNP)]

Thank you, Mr McCabe. I am actually Dr Whitford; Eilidh Whiteford—my hon. Friend the Member for Banff and Buchan (Dr Whiteford)—is the other one, whom I always get mixed up with.

Like the hon. Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double), I am clearly not skinny. I was not overweight as a child; it was the usual comfort eating later on, middle age, lack of exercise and all the rest of it. I know what it is like to move through a world where everything shouts “eat me” all the time. We live in a totally obesogenic environment. The idea that it is easy to resist things is simply not true. Everything is geared towards making people eat unhealthily. We spend a little more than £600 million on obesity prevention, but £256 billion is spent on advertising unhealthy foods. It is David and Goliath. It is difficult for people to make the right choices.

Obviously the debate is about the sugar tax, but as Members have said, the issue goes much wider than that. The hon. Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston), who is the chair of the Health Committee, talked about the sheer scale of the problem. One third of children leaving school are obese or overweight and a quarter are obese—that is the reason for the differing figures mentioned earlier. It is predicted that 70% of the population will be overweight or obese by the mid-2030s. That is an astronomical number. Our health service will not cope with all the directly obesity-related problems such as type 2 diabetes, cancers and heart disease. We have heard figures about the cost of that from other members of the Health Committee, but it is estimated that the societal costs are £27 billion. We all know someone who was overweight or obese as a child, and we know about the bullying, exclusion and self-contempt that occurs and the impact that that has on schooling, and therefore on jobs, which leads to another generation of deprivation. People say that a tax might be regressive, but it would be no more so than duty on cigarettes or alcohol. It is important to see it in that light.

We have discussed evidence from Mexico, which we heard in the Committee, but other countries such as Norway, Hungary and Finland have taken the same approach. Although not all the evidence has been peer-reviewed, published and assessed, all the details of the national experiments point in the same direction. Cochrane reviews coming up in the next year to 18 months will be able to put that information in a solid position based on experiments and data. At that point it will not be possible to ignore the issue, but we need to be thinking now about our options and what we will do.

Although this is a debate about sugar tax, the Health Committee made nine recommendations. Sugar tax is the one that the media are interested in, because it catches the light, but it is part of a whole package and a sugar tax is not even in our top three recommendations. The first is about promotions, because 40% of food bought in our shops is on promotion, and that is heavily weighted towards unhealthy foods. We need to look to rebalance that. One Member who has scuttled off said that we would come up with other rules such as getting rid of discounting, or we would suggest portion control—darn tootin’ we will!

We need to realise what we are fighting, because we are talking about something deeply shocking and very dangerous. The argument is that people who are less well off save money if they can buy one for £1 or two for £1.50. However, the evidence we heard is that, if that means they buy two packets of biscuits, one will not be put in the cupboard for next week; both will get eaten this week, and the same mum or dad will be back the following week to shop for another packet of biscuits. Therefore they have not only eaten far more unhealthy food and sugar but spent more money. Promotions of unhealthy foods in multi-buys are not helping anyone.

We also see a change in portion sizes. Packets are getting bigger, and there is the bottomless cup at McDonald’s or wherever. There is the end of the aisle, the pester power and the stuff at the till. Every mum and dad out shopping at the supermarket with their wain—that is Scottish for child—will know what it is like: they can see the light at the end of the tunnel, then their child hangs out of the trolley and grabs something. They may put it in their mouth, which means the mum or dad is obliged to pay for it. Some supermarkets have been good at taking that opportunity away, but not all of them. My local supermarket still has sweets right at the till.

Promotions have a big impact and should be tackled. So should marketing, because of the sheer scale of the budgets for and against obesity. It is not just about asking for advertising to be put after 9 o’clock; it is particularly about what is emerging on the internet in social media and advergames, as the hon. Member for Totnes mentioned. Things keep wriggling around, so we need a strategy broad enough to cover that.

Reformulation is almost the holy grail. We have seen its success with salt, but it took a long time. We have taken about 40% of the salt out of the British diet, and by and large people have not noticed. However, we do not have 10 years to do that. Reformulation is also much harder to do with sugar, because it has an impact on the structure and texture of food, but we need to get on with it. The reason why we are spending so much time talking about sugary drinks is because, as the hon. Lady said, they are one product where reformulation is easy: we can replace sugar with sweeteners.

We also need to reformulate to drive down sweeteners. We need to reset our sweet tooth—we have all seen someone washing down a big slab of sticky cake with a diet soft drink—because the craving remains. Even those who choose diet soft drinks will find that their craving for sugar remains, so when they cook they will add more sugar and they will eat more cake and biscuits. Sweeteners can really help us to speed up the removal of sugar, but we still need them to be on a downward journey. That must be done with industry, which has done a lot. Many soft drink manufacturers provide a choice, so if a sugar tax is introduced, hopefully that should nudge people across to less sugary drinks, as the hon. Member for Totnes said. It would be ideal if there was no tax collected at all, because that would suggest that the policy was working. At the moment, however, the traditional product is still absolutely packed with sugar.

[John Glen]

The hon. Lady is speaking with her customary authority on the subject. Does she agree that the industry has the potential to go a lot further so that we can make more progress before a sugar tax, which has attracted all the attention, is instituted? It is a matter of providing choices, and a lot of consumer power could be harnessed to help us make that progress.

[Dr Whitford]

As the hon. Member for Totnes mentioned, the people who make such choices tend to be those who are more oriented towards a healthy diet anyway. It is about trying to teach people in the mire of deprivation, and often in the mire of despair, who smoke more, use more alcohol and take more sugar. They are the very people who are hit by all our measures to try to bring about health improvement.

All the industries are making efforts, but they are afraid of being out there on their own and seeing their competitors mopping up their business. That is why we need regulation. In our inquiry, that came out from the retailers in particular, who said they wanted a level playing field. Whether it is through a sugar tax or regulation, they want to feel that everyone has to move forward.

We also need leadership. The Food Standards Agency was important in leading on salt reformulation, so we need to work out who will be the leader on this, because we need a focused project to get not just sugar but fat and calorific intake out of our diet. As has been mentioned, there are also hidden sugars, particularly in tomato products such as baked beans, tomato sauces and bolognese sauces in which it is easy to hide sugar. When we start to look at that, we see that it is quite scary.

That is where labelling and education comes in. The traffic light system has been helpful for a broad range of foods. When we are looking for a sandwich in a rush, we can spot the green and amber on the label as opposed to the red and red. However, that will not help with sugary drinks, which get a red light and two green lights because they do not contain salt and fat. Therefore, someone who picks that up might think, “Two greens— that must be quite good.” That is why the labelling of teaspoons of sugar is important. The industry could be applauded as it took every single teaspoon of sugar out of a drink.

We have heard talk about the nanny state and people having the freedom to do what they like, but as a doctor for 33 years I heard that about seatbelts and crash helmets. People want to feel the wind in their hair, but they do not look so good if they have come off their bike. We talk about the challenge of cigarettes and alcohol, and sugar is the same. All Governments have a responsibility to look at the report and all the measures it suggests, and to bring them in as a full package, because we need to tackle this, and we need to start now.