The UK Government must act urgently to adopt a comprehensive food strategy following years of failure to effectively tackle the obesity crisis.
This was the central recommendation in a hard-hitting and at times damning report by the House of Lords food, diet and obesity committee, in which peers called for food businesses that don’t meet healthy sales targets to be locked out of discussions on the formation of policy.
The ‘Recipe for health: a plan to fix our broken food system’ report spans 180 pages and tackles a wide range of subjects including the role of industry in shaping diets, how to make food environments healthier, and the debate over ultra-processed foods.
Its core recommendation is that the government must act as a matter of urgency to adopt a new, comprehensive and integrated food strategy to address food system failures.
The Committee found that between 1992 and 2020, successive governments proposed nearly 700 wide-ranging policies to tackle obesity in England. Despite this, obesity rates have continued to rise with two-thirds of adults in England classified as overweight and just under a third living with obesity.
At the heart of this “utter failure” has been a misplaced focus on policies that rely on personal choice rather than tackling the underlying drivers of unhealthy diets, according to peers.
The report proposes a wide range of interventions to fix what the Committee describes as a “broken food system”. Key among these are for large food businesses to be forced to report on the healthiness of their sales, and for businesses that derive more than a defined share of sales from less healthy products to be excluded from any discussions on the formation of policy on food, diet and obesity prevention.
Following the success of the soft drinks industry levy in reducing the volume of sugar consumed from soft drinks, the government should introduce a salt and sugar reformulation tax and consider how the revenue can be used to make healthier food cheaper, particularly for people on low incomes.
The Committee also calls for further independent research to be carried out to understand the links between ultra-processed foods and adverse health outcomes.
And it wants the Food Standards Agency to be given independent oversight of the food system and responsibility for reporting to Parliament on progress against targets to reduce sales of less healthy foods and associated health outcomes.
In addition, there should be a total ban on the advertising of less healthy food across all media by the end of this Parliament, following the planned 9pm watershed and ban on paid-for online advertising due to come into force from October 2025.
The Government should also enable auto-enrolment both for its ‘Healthy start’ scheme and for free school meals and immediately review the costs and benefits to public health of increasing funding rates and widening eligibility for them.
“Over the last 30 years successive governments have failed to reduce obesity rates, despite hundreds of policy initiatives,” said Baroness Walmsley, chair of the House of Lords food, diet and obesity committee. “This failure is largely due to policies that focused on personal choice and responsibility out of misguided fears of the ‘nanny state’. Both the government and the food industry must take responsibility for what has gone wrong and take urgent steps to put it right.”
The report was welcomed as a “major step forward in tackling public health and diet” by Stefan Descheemaeker, CEO of frozen foods giant Nomad Foods, which owns brands including Birds Eye and Goodfellas and was one of the businesses invited to provide oral evidence to the Committee. “We support measures requiring companies to report on the proportion of their sales that come from healthy products, which we have been doing for the last seven years,” said Descheemaeker.
However, Kate Nicholls, chief executive of UKHospitality, said the Committee’s recommendation to exclude, under certain circumstances, food businesses and the trade associations that represent them from discussions about food, diet and obesity policy was concerning. “It would eliminate a key partner that is, ultimately, responsible for delivering the Committee’s ambition to deliver a better food system,” Nicholls said.
