A comprehensive new report is right to call for a shift away from personal responsibility for dietary ill health and start holding those selling unhealthy food to account, says Ali Morpeth.
Hot on the heels of the Darzi report, which warned the NHS must “reform or die” and that action has been sorely lacking on regulation of the food industry, the House of Lords report on food, diet, and obesity is yet another wake-up call for Labour to take action against the rising tide of obesity and diet-related diseases.
With Labour’s prevention agenda in the spotlight, the report sets a clear direction for effective, long-term health policy baked into a wider disease prevention strategy.
It draws on input from over 150 organisations and zeroes in on decades of failed obesity initiatives – over 700 in the past 30 years – that focused on personal responsibility over systemic change.
“Recipe for Health: A Plan to Fix Our Broken Food System” calls for a radical shift in policy making, to change the operating environment for health. The big idea? That switching the focus away from the individual and regulating businesses that rely on sales of less healthy food will in turn give businesses the incentive to produce and sell healthier food and make the marketplace healthier by default.
To enable the shift, peers suggest abandoning the idea of self-regulation and giving the Food Standards Agency (FSA) independent oversight of the food system. They suggest that to hold the food industry accountable, and remove potential conflicts, “food businesses that derive more than a proportion of sales from less healthy products” should be excluded from discussions on policy, including the industry associations that represent them.
To flick the switch towards a healthier operating environment, the Committee recommends a long list of joined up policy actions. These include a new tax on businesses that use high amounts of sugar or salt to help people eat healthier food. Why? Because evidence shows taxes have encouraged reformulation: the soft drinks industry levy reduced sugar content in soft drinks by over a third in just four years. Importantly, and often forgotten in the media narrative, a new industry levy could also generate funds to make healthier food more widely accessible, for example through subsidising fruit and veg or expanding free school meals.
The Committee’s vision also calls for sweeping advertising restrictions on unhealthy food across all media by 2026, and widespread restrictions on businesses that don’t meet mandatory targets from promoting their products. Speaking to Labour’s pre-election vision of supporting the “healthiest generation of children ever” the report pushes for “auto-enrolling” eligible families onto the Healthy Start scheme and expanding free school meals, as well as immediately reviewing the costs and benefits to public health of increasing funding and widening the eligibility of the schemes to reach more families.
England is grappling with one of the highest obesity rates among wealthy nations, largely due to unhealthy diets. Right now, diet-related illnesses are the biggest killer after smoking, and it’s not just a health crisis – it’s draining the economy by billions each year in healthcare costs and lost productivity, costing 1–2% of the UK’s GDP.
The House of Lords committee has called on the government for a bold, top-down food strategy with clear targets and a practical plan to create a healthier food system. Labour’s response, due by Christmas, has the potential to supercharge the prevention agenda and set the UK on a path to better health.
Ali Morpeth is a Registered Public Health Nutritionist (RNutr) working at the intersection of health and sustainability.
