Behaviour Change: Science and Technology Committee Report

Lord Krebs Excerpts

Wednesday 11th July 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Krebs]

My Lords, I, too, wish to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Neuberger, for chairing the committee and for leading us to produce an excellent and important report.

The idea of using insights from behavioural science to affect public policy is by no means new. Back in the middle of the last century, the influential American psychologist, BF Skinner, wrote a utopian novel, Walden Two, in which he described a society in which, to use a phrase often quoted by the Prime Minister, everyone was persuaded to do the right thing through what Skinner called behavioural engineering. So we are not talking about new territory but about a different approach to the territory of using insights from behavioural science to affect public policy.

As has already been mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Neuberger, a traditional approach, apart from banning activities, is to use financial incentives, taxes or subsidies to persuade people to do the right thing—carrots or sticks—or to use information campaigns to appeal to our sense of reason. If we are told it is bad to smoke or bad to drink and drive, the reasoning human being will perhaps stop doing so. Certainly taxation, in the right setting, has an effect; information campaigns have a rather limited effect, as has already been said.

However, the newer approaches that we looked at, as the noble Baroness, Lady Neuberger, said, draw on insights from disciplines such as marketing—how companies persuade consumers to buy more of their products—insights from behavioural economics and insights from psychology, all of which converge on tapping-in not to our thinking mind but to our reflexive, semi-automatic responses and inbuilt biases. For example, all of us in this Room have a bias discount into the future: rewards now are more valuable than rewards in the far distant future. All of us are more averse to losses than we are to gains. It is more painful to have someone take £100 away from you than to have someone never give you £100 in the first place.

All of us are influenced by social mores. Why did I buy an iPhone two or three years ago? It was not because I needed an iPhone but because all my friends had an iPhone—apart from my noble friend Lord May—and I felt that I had to have one.

Another aspect on which this new area of research into human behaviour has focused is identifying barriers. We live in a society in which we are confronted with choice, but choice is often illusory. Going back to mobile phones, how many noble Lords in this Room know whether they have the best phone tariff? The answer is that none of them does. There are estimated to be at least 7 million possible tariff combinations, so how can you possibly make an informed choice? We therefore use simple rules of thumb such as opting for a brand that is familiar. The question is whether these insights into human behaviour are effective in influencing public policy.

At lunchtime, I went over to talk to David Halpern, the head of the Behavioural Insights Team at No.10, informally known as the “nudge unit”. There are two bits of good news that I have to convey. First, the nudge unit is carrying out proper, randomised control trials through different government departments. One point that we drew out in our report on lack of good evidence is beginning to make progress. Secondly, there are some clear successes using these insights into human behaviour, such as increasing the proportion of court fines paid and positive responses to requests for income tax, as well as encouraging people to relicense their cars and take up loft insulation. So there are some success stories as a result of using these new insights into human behaviour.

I want to talk about one of our two case studies to which the noble Baroness, Lady Neuberger, has already referred, on obesity. Will the softer approaches using our subconscious biases, preferences and rules of thumb help to tackle this massive health problem? I do not need to repeat the facts, but I will. It is estimated by the Government that 40% of adults in this country will be obese by 2025; the estimated cost to the NHS, already referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, is £2 billion a year by 2030. Of course, the reason for that is that many non-communicable diseases are influenced by obesity, and in the United States it is considered the second largest cause of preventable premature death after smoking. So it is an immense public health problem, not just in this country.

Our report highlights two things. First, not just this Government but successive Governments have made little or no progress in tackling this major health problem at the population level. So it is a huge challenge, which we have not yet managed to conquer. Secondly, on a point that has already been summarised by others, we saw little or no evidence that the softer approaches—the nudges—will really have an effect on their own.

I refer to two examples that have been alluded to by the noble Baroness, Lady Neuberger—traffic lights and advertising to children. When I was chairman of the Food Standards Agency, I was involved in trying to persuade the Government and industry to behave responsibly on food labelling and advertising food to children. The mere fact that the food industry was averse to traffic lights gave me the answer. If the industry does not like traffic lights, they must tell consumers something that consumers would like to know but that the industry does not want consumers to know about its food. We did a review at the Food Standards Agency into the impact of advertising and promotion of food to children, and the food industry commissioned its own review to show that advertising has no effect. I said to people in the industry, “Then why on earth are you spending all this money doing it if it has no effect whatever?” I rest my case.

So what does work with obesity, if it is not going to be nudging and the softer approaches? There are three recent reviews in the British Medical Journal. One is on the effectiveness of different kinds of nudges, or providing information. One that may have some effect is the one that we have alluded to—simple nutrition labelling. Another that may have some effect is portion sizing. There is good evidence that if you serve smaller portions people eat less. Since part of the obesity problem is eating too much, that would be a good thing to do. There is some modest evidence on positioning, and that if you put sweets low down at the checkout counter, as Marks and Spencer does in Oxford, it encourages young children to eat sweets. There is some evidence that priming, or giving people alerting signals before they start to eat in a restaurant on what their dietary goals might be, can have modest effects. But all these are relatively modest.

Another review looks at a measure that does have a significant effect and is exactly parallel to a measure alluded to by previous speakers on alcohol—namely, taxation. Eleven countries have now introduced taxes on fattening foods that contain a lot of sugar or fat. These include Denmark, Hungary, France, Finland and 23 states in the United States. The review in the BMJ suggests that a tax level of at least 20% is required to have an effect, rather like the minimum price for alcohol to which the noble Baroness, Lady Neuberger, referred. One advantage of taxing unhealthy foods is that it would drive the industry to reformulate foods to avoid the taxes, just as the campaign that the Food Standards Agency started and the Department of Health has taken over to reduce salt in food has caused companies to reformulate their processed food to take salt out of it. Is the taxation of unhealthy foods a regressive tax? After all, those who consume these high-fat, high-sugar foods tend to be the poorest in our society. One could argue that if it dissuades them from eating such food, we are helping the less well off and furthermore, the Government could use the revenue to support the poorest in society. So measures could be taken to tackle the obesity crisis but they are tougher than nudging.

The noble Lord, Lord Giddens, referred to smoking. The change of prevalence in smoking in this country has been brought about by a combination of taxation, legislation and education. There are two other success stories of government policy in changing behaviour in the population, the first of which is drink-driving. When I was a student at Oxford University we would go to a pub in the country and the landlord would say, “Would you like to have one for the road, sir?”. That is inconceivable today. Why has our drink-driving culture changed? It is because of the introduction of legislation and the breathalyser as part of that legislation. The third example, on top of smoking and drink-driving is the wearing of seat belts. It was not just “Clunk Click, Every Trip” from Jimmy Savile, but people could be fined or penalised for not wearing a seat belt. Now most people when getting into a car wear seat belts without thinking about it.

Does the Minister consider that stronger measures will have to be taken to deal with the problem of obesity and would the Government consider following the 11 other countries in introducing a tax on unhealthy foods as an instrument to achieve change? Nobody has yet talked about transport but that is the other case study in our report. Does the Minister agree that softer approaches such as nudging will not really move people out of their cars on to public transport, their bikes or their feet? Success stories from other countries show that Copenhagen spent £40 per person year on year to achieve a modal shift in transport to get people on to bikes or walking. The average local authority in this country spends one-fortieth of that—£1 per person per year in providing alternative forms of transport. I hope that the Minister will answer those questions for us.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I take the noble Lord’s point that perhaps the government response should have taken more care with the question of data. There is another debate to be had—I encourage all Members of the Committee to participate in it more actively—about government data collection, government data sharing and access to government data which relates to the census and questions of privacy. We all need to engage in that debate because government is now collecting a great deal more data, as are private actors. Government behaves with much more caution about the use of that data than Tesco or Marks and Spencer. As with obesity, there are important questions as to how far we lower privacy issues in government in order to gain benefits in public health and elsewhere.

I mentioned the White Paper Test, Learn, Adapt, which has been recommended by Ben Goldacre and Tim Harford. That suggests to me that there are those in the media who recognise the importance of government data and at least think we are attempting to move in the right direction.

The noble Lord, Lord Giddens, talked about corporate power and how to confront it. That is also part of a much larger issue. We are left with business and the media setting a large amount of what becomes the social norm. The power of advertising—and advertising is absolutely about covert nudging as opposed to overt messaging—is an issue that again we cannot answer here. It is fundamental to our debate about the balance between government, society and market, in which that we all need to engage. I look forward to the noble Lord’s next written contribution on that fundamental issue.

The noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, talked about the international dimensions of behavioural influence and cultural change and whether we should be following US research. There is a fair amount of independent research in this area. The German Marshall Fund does some very good research, which I follow. There are some mildly puzzling outcomes. From the surveys that I have seen, the most pro-Western public in the entire Middle East is the urban population of Iran. Whether or not that suggests that the behavioural impact you should be having is to impose sanctions on the regime, it raises some very large questions about what policies and interventions you pursue and what you get back in return. I will feed that back in.

The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, raised a number of questions about transport, which I have touched on. Government studies have shown that cost, time and reliability are clearly very important factors. There is some evidence for providing better, simple information. The new signs at bus stops which tell you when the next bus will arrive increase the number of people who wait for the bus. That is another nudge if you like. Information helps.

David Halpern, the head of the Behavioural Insights Team, is very interested in the built environment and how far it impacts upon behaviour. That is a really difficult, long-term issue, the sort of thing that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, was talking about. Redesigning public spaces and how you design footpaths and cycle ways help with this, but part of the answer to improving the urban environment and encouraging people to walk rather than use cars is persuading them to live more closely together and not to wish to live 10 to 20 miles from where they work.

Another area in which the provision of information would help—and here government has a great deal further to go—is on the concreting of front gardens, which over the past 20 or 30 years has contributed very substantially to the problems of urban flooding. The provision of information about the utility of digging up your front garden again and providing green spaces through which the water can drain is clearly something that government can do without enforcing it.

I love the term “cognitive polyphasia”. We are all stuck with that. As someone who, when in opposition, campaigned for the pedestrianisation of further squares in London and, in particular, of Parliament Square, I am conscious that there are a number of people who think that it is very good to have pedestrianisation so long as they can still get their limousine to take them to St Margaret’s for weddings and do not have to spend two to three minutes longer in their taxi from Smith Square. Individuals often resist things that in the long run will be to their advantage.

This is a broad initiative of government—I stress of government because it is not a partisan move from this Government. We all want to find ways in which the range of government interventions—from information through to pressures and financial disincentives to tighter regulation and, in some cases, prohibition and penalties, as in seat belts and some areas of health—will help to change behaviour. That is not something that the Government can do alone. We have to work with publics whose attitudes are often highly contradictory and whose willingness to accept evidence when presented as mediated through the media is sometimes relatively limited.

What I hope that the Committee is persuaded of, into which the report provided a useful insight, is that this is one of the many tools available for government which helps government to be more self-conscious. The Behavioural Insights Team is in the Cabinet Office to provide a resource across government and its many departments to encourage them to use more of those interventions to affect behaviour. On that basis, I give way to both noble Lords.

[Lord Krebs]

Will the Minister respond specifically to my question about the 11 countries that have introduced taxes on foods that specifically contribute to obesity—high sugar, high fat foods? Might the Government follow the lead of other countries in tackling the obesity crisis by that measure?