Sugary Drinks Tax

John Glen Excerpts

Monday 30th November 2015 Westminster Hall

[James Berry (Kingston and Surbiton) (Con)]

rose—

[John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)]

rose—

[Helen Jones]

I am not sure which of these defenders of the Government to take first. I will take the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (James Berry).

[Helen Jones]

Yes, the hon. Gentleman is right that we need much clearer labelling. As I will come on to say, the proposal in the petition is one avenue for tackling the problem, but not the only one and not a silver bullet.

I will take the intervention of the hon. Member for Salisbury (John Glen), but then I will make some progress.

[John Glen]

I am extremely grateful to the hon. Lady. She is making a powerful case, of which I am somewhat persuaded. However, does she not feel that it would be best if the Government were given an opportunity to develop the responsibility deal and to do a lot more to change public attitudes and consumption patterns before a sugar tax, the effects of which are not yet fully known, is implemented?

[Helen Jones]

The public health responsibility deal has had a fair trial over the past five years. The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee said of it that

“the current Public Health Responsibility Deal pledge on obesity is not a proportionate response to the scale of the problem.”

The reason for that, as the British Medical Association has pointed out, is that the deal does not set targets for individual food and drink products, or a timescale in which changes have to be made. That is why I have come to believe that there is a great deal of merit in what the petitioners are asking for, as one method among a whole lot of ways to tackle the problem.

A tax on sugary drinks would probably have to be at the level of 10% to 20% to make a change in behaviour, apparently—Public Health England suggests that range. There is evidence from Mexico and France that at that level, people’s behaviour starts to change and they start to choose sugar-free alternatives. However, that has to be part of a whole-Government effort to reduce obesity, which has to begin in schools.

Much work has been done on improving school meals, setting better nutritional standards for them and removing vending machines from schools. The problem is that those things do not apply to academies and free schools, and as more schools become academies we are putting more children at risk of poor nutrition. We should not tolerate that. It is good that food and nutritional education is compulsory at key stage 3, but we need to look at how that operates. Much more investment in equipment is needed. Schools need to be outward-facing and need to encourage local people to visit them to talk to children about food and how it is grown. The best schools do that, but often the curriculum is not appropriate for all children.

In my entire school career I did a term and a half of cookery, because it was considered that those who were academically inclined did not need to learn how to cook. The only thing I can remember being taught is how to make rock buns, something that I have not indulged in before or since. Another example is that my son specialised in Indian cooking. It was supposed to be brought home for the evening meal, but anyone who suggests that has never met a teenage boy. That was interesting, but expensive. What most of us need to know when we first set out in the world is how to eat healthily on a restricted budget. That is the sort of thing that we need to look at with our children.

In fact, all public institutions should be promoting healthy eating. Dare I suggest that we start with some of the vending machines in this place, so that I do not walk down the corridors thinking, “Get thee behind me, Satan”, every time I pass machines full of chocolate and fizzy drinks? That needs to be done in hospitals as well—there have been a number of articles about that recently.

I challenge people to walk into the foyer of many hospitals. There are machines selling chocolate and fizzy drinks, and the outlets often sell cake and biscuits quite cheaply but overcharge for a piece of fruit. If someone wanders in to buy a paper, they will be offered a big, discounted chocolate bar at the till. That makes it much harder for people to resist temptation. Of course, that is difficult to do, but the message that hospitals are giving their patients, staff and visitors is, “Don’t do as we say; do as we do.” The Government urgently need to negotiate with trusts and with NHS England to see how the issue can be remedied. It is nonsense to take an income from those sorts of outlets in one part of the hospital and then to deal with the effects of poor diet in another.

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[Dr Wollaston]

In an ideal world, I agree, it would be nice not to have to do any of that, but I return to the point about whether the Government also have a responsibility for the health of the nation’s children. Should the Government step back? Should any of us feel that it is acceptable to condemn one in four—a quarter—of the most disadvantaged children in Britain to a lifetime of ill health? If we can do something simply to nudge people a different way, should we not consider the possibilities, and ask how different those children’s life chances could be? As I said, such a tax would not be regressive because there is always an easier, untaxed alternative. We are talking not about telling people that they cannot have a product that they enjoy but about nudging them to choose a healthier one.

There is an interesting phenomenon whereby education, for example, is sometimes taken up by the people in society who are already healthier, which can inadvertently end up widening the health inequality gap. We should target measures to help those who are suffering the most harm. As for this being regressive, look at who is suffering the most harm. Is my right hon. Friend happy with the situation as it stands?

[John Glen]

Does not that point also suggest that the distribution of education interventions is not being focused in the right way? The Government could do significantly more to improve support, advice and education to allow that group of people who consume too much to make informed choices before going down the route of a tax.

[Dr Wollaston]

I ask my hon. Friend to look later in our report, where we set out some of the evidence on delivering education and advice. I am afraid that it does not provide the solution that he imagines it will, but I encourage him to read the report. I wish education alone could solve the problem, but it will not, and it tends to be short-lived. The scale of the problem demands our attention.

A tax would not be regressive because there would always be an alternative. No one is thinking of introducing a sugar tax of the type that sometimes people imagine when they hear “sugar tax”, which is one that would apply to the bag of sugar that they buy off the shelf or to biscuits, cakes and sweets. We are not suggesting that, because it is difficult to reformulate those products as entirely sugar-free alternatives. We are considering only products with an easy alternative. Why did we choose sugary drinks? Look at the data in our report, particularly on teenagers’ diets. A third of their entire sugar intake comes from sugar-sweetened drinks. In other words, there is an easy win here, through which we can help to take calories out of children’s diets, but no one is suggesting that that is the entire answer.

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[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to speak in this debate and to follow the two marvellous opening speeches. It is a shame that the right hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mark Field) has now gone after intervening so often—I think he intervened seven times—and then complaining that there was no debate. Now he has deserted us to spend more time with his prejudices.

This is a debate of great importance. I will not go into detail about what generation I was part of, but there were certainly no sugary drinks when I was a child. There was a lot of water—we had that in abundance—but, being a child of the war, I had the benefit of a system of rationing whereby the amount of food was carefully controlled. We were probably the healthiest generation there has ever been, because we were quite rightly denied the damaging drinks that children often have now.

I want to make just one point, which is about who comes first in the Government’s thinking. Where does public opinion come? Where does the health of children come? We all know the misery that is felt by overweight children, and how they suffer mockery at school. It is extremely damaging for them. There is no question but that we have to do all we can to avoid obesity as far as possible. We can do something about it, but a number of decisions taken by the Government have been extremely worrying, and one of them is this—turning down the idea of a sugar tax.

Recently we had a debate in the House on a sensible Bill, which was supported by the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford), a Scottish National party Member. She is a breast cancer surgeon, and she made a splendid, well-informed speech in support of the Off-patent Drugs Bill, which would have been greatly beneficial to people in need of drugs, as it would have made them cheaper, and also to the health service. Members of all parties spoke in the debate, but the only voice for the party of Government was the Minister’s, and we know that the pharmaceutical industry—big pharma—has the Government in a throat hold. It is big pharma that decides what happens.

I believe it is the same with “big sugar”—that the Government are excessively influenced by the commercial interests of the sugar industry. They are also influenced by other industries—the alcohol industry is very powerful. We recall that at the time of the 2010 election there was an impassioned plea by the future Prime Minister. He said he knew what the next scandal in Britain was going to be: it was going to be a lobbying scandal. He knew about lobbying, of course, because he was a lobbyist himself. He knew about the influence of lobbyists—the odd word here, the invitation to a reception there, getting someone on side by inviting them to a seminar in the Alps, or in Bermuda. That is the way they work. Are the Government listening to the financial concerns of the greedy lobbyists, or to the pleas for a more rational, healthy policy?

[John Glen]

Would the hon. Gentleman like to reflect on the comment made earlier, about the record of his party in government in Wales? If the sugar tax is such a priority, why has there not been more progress in Wales?

[Paul Flynn]

We have had a—[Interruption.] Exactly, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies) for saying so. I respect my hon. Friend. We had a little exchange in Welsh about who made the remark in question. I find the story most unlikely, and I would like to check on it.

The Conservative Government have abused their position repeatedly to attack the achievements of the health service in Wales. In one week, the Daily Mail had the Welsh health service as its No. 1 story for four days running. There is no way, by news standards or by the value of the stories, that that was justified. I am proud of the achievements of the health service in Wales, and I am glad that today is the day when the presumed organ consent system begins. Wales is leading Britain on that matter, and there is much other pioneering work being done by the Labour party and the Labour Government in Wales.

Unfortunately, the Tory Government like to use the Welsh health service as a stick with which to beat the Labour party. That is irresponsible and dangerous, because one of the most important things is that people should have faith in their own health service. It is an important part of therapy and confidence: when people go into hospital, they are of course nervous and concerned, and when they read these lying stories about political—

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[John Mc Nally]

I could not agree more. That is one of the biggest problems. People drink lots of sugar, which gets them high quickly, but they then come down and go into a never-ending cycle of having to drink it again. It is an extremely worrying state of affairs for everybody, so I totally agree with the hon. Lady.

I believe that raising tax on sugary drinks would be an effective means of reducing childhood obesity. I thank all the MPs here, and I hope they all agree that Jamie Oliver should be applauded for setting up this petition and making use of his profile and that of the charity Sustain. I, for one, echo his concerns about the health and welfare of our future generations, and I share his belief that

“we can shift the dial on the epidemic of childhood obesity.”

I thank the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), who is no longer in his place, for his diligent work in pursuing better public health awareness for the people of this country.

It is commonly known that sugar-sweetened drinks are associated with a higher risk of weight gain than similarly calorific solid food. Evidence indicates that there is a link between the habitual excess consumption of sugar, type 2 diabetes, and weight gain. A large study of European adults showed that there is a 22% increase in diabetes incidence associated with the habitual consumption of one daily serving of sugar-sweetened drinks. Sugar-sweetened drinks contribute a significant amount of sugar to children’s diets. A reduction in their consumption would, in my view, significantly lower the intake of sugar and therefore reduce obesity and the associated detrimental effects on personal health.

According to statistics released in 2014, 64% of adults in the UK are overweight or obese, which cannot be good for anybody. I am sure my hon. Friend the Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) will talk about that fact later. International comparisons indicate that the UK has above-average levels of overweight and obese adults. The cost of our obese population is not just felt in the increased risk of a range of serious diseases, including type 2 diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and some cancers; there is also an economic cost. It is estimated that obesity costs the NHS up to £600 million in Scotland alone, and the McKinsey Global Institute estimates that the cost to the UK is equivalent to 3% of gross domestic product. The Scottish Government await the outcome of the Cochrane review on that issue.

Worryingly, for the majority of adults, obesity starts in childhood. Evidence shows that being obese in childhood increases the risk of becoming an obese adult. If we do not encourage adults and children to reduce their sugar intake, the economic costs and the cost to the NHS will continue to be a significant burden. Perhaps that is where a bit of libertarian paternalism is needed. As was said earlier, it is possible and legitimate to nudge people.

[John Glen]

Will the hon. Gentleman reflect on the fact that, sadly, a massive proportion of those who are obese are the poorest in our society? No Government of any party can ignore that fact. The poorest do not have a free choice when they buy sugary items.

[John Mc Nally]

The hon. Gentleman is right. Once again, it is the poorest who do not know how to make such choices. I hope to come on to that point later.

Although I welcome the proposal to increase tax on sugary drinks and agree with the rationale behind it, I am slightly cautious about it, simply because the body of evidence on this subject does not robustly demonstrate the effect it would have in isolation on rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes. I feel strongly that a raft of measures should be developed to reduce sugar intake and obesity. Taxation of this kind is an important tool in shifting the population’s dietary patterns. Educational messages alone simply will not achieve the reduction that we need, so fiscal and reformulation measures need to be introduced. We MPs can help to nudge that decision. We should improve the decision-making process to allow the choosers whom the hon. Gentleman mentioned to make better choices for their own welfare.

In conjunction with a sugar tax, we require legislation on the reformulation of foods to reduce overall calorie intake. If that is not possible, the industry should be compelled to reduce portion sizes—although not of Mars bars. We also need to introduce marketing restrictions on unhealthy foods to restrict the marketing of foods that are high in salt, sugar and fat to children. Restrictions should be applied most stringently to TV and online advertising, as evidence suggests that under-16s are strongly affected by advertising through those mediums.

We must improve our confused labelling system. We should continue to support a consistent front-of-pack labelling system and should extend caloric labelling, such as the traffic-light system, to all food and drink. Arguably, it is most crucial for the Government to invest more heavily in active travel by dedicating a national budget to walking and cycling; I am absolutely with the hon. Member for Warrington North on that.

The obesity epidemic is not going away. If anything, it will get worse for successive generations unless the Government take action. Implementing and evaluating a sugar tax as part of a childhood obesity strategy would be one step towards improving the health of our nation. I urge the Government to take heed of the petition and implement such a tax.

Finally, I holidayed in Cornwall this year, so I appreciate what the hon. Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double) said about weight—such is the quality of the food in Cornwall.

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[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.