Will health policies survive Labour reset?

The government is coming under growing pressure to pause the development of measures designed to encourage a shift to healthier, more sustainable diets

Nick Hughes

Pizzas and quiches. Biscuits, waffles, and wafers. Boiled sweets, toffees and caramels. These are just a handful of the 125 ‘everyday essential’ food items that will have tariffs suspended as part of the UK Government’s efforts to rein in food price inflation driven by the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.

“My priority is keeping prices down for households and businesses,” said Chancellor Rachel Reeves, as she signed off a package of cost-of-living measures that also includes a temporary reduction in VAT on days out, and a freeze in fuel duty.

As Footprint reported last week, sticking plaster policies remain the government’s go-to solution in this era of cascading crises that threaten the UK’s food security. A group of experts pointed out as much in a letter to ministers last week as they called for the national food strategy to be updated to prepare the UK for a future of higher temperatures and more severe weather.

Any measure that softens – however marginally – the impact of food price inflation will surely be welcomed by businesses struggling to absorb a cocktail of cost increases. But short-term thinking begets policy incoherence. As food and health experts have been quick to point out, suspending tariffs on a raft of unhealthy food products is not an action consistent with the government’s ambition to preside over the healthiest generation of children ever, albeit more nutritious foods like avocados, apples, olives and quinoa also feature on the list.

We are entering a critical time for UK policy on dietary (and planetary) health. We will soon discover whether a government set to embark on a battle for its own soul, and desperate to feel the long-absent adrenaline rush of business approval, remains committed to a healthy eating agenda that, on paper at least, is more ambitious in supporting a shift to nutritious, sustainable diets than anything that has preceded it in the past two decades (not a high bar it has to be said).

Healthy sales targets

Last summer, in its 10 year health plan for England, the government set out plans to introduce a healthy food standard which will require large food businesses, including foodservice operators, to report publicly on the healthiness of their food sales and meet future targets. The idea is that businesses will be given the freedom to meet the standard however works best for them, whether that’s by reformulating products and tweaking recipes, changing layouts, offering discounts on healthy foods, or changing loyalty schemes to promote healthier options.

It marks a shift from a focus on specific problem nutrients – specifically salt and sugar, both of which have both been subject to voluntary reformulation programmes that are now seemingly dormant – to a more holistic approach to nutrition policy focused as much on positive nutrients like fibre and protein. Yet delivering the standard won’t be easy. As Sonia Pombo from Action on Salt & Sugar noted in a recent edition of The Small Print podcast, the process of getting the work done could take “many years” even if “everything was very smooth” within government. The fact that “it’s all very volatile at the moment”, as Pombo put it, means the beginning of a new era of mandatory reporting and targets could be far in the future, if it ever arrives at all.

The inevitability of a future healthy food standard should not be taken for granted. The health secretary who signed off the 10-year health plan, Wes Streeting, has since resigned for political reasons to be replaced by James Murray. Murray is the eighth person to hold the health brief since 2018 and was most recently a senior minister at the Treasury, a department not known for its ability to see the value in policies designed to achieve long-term public savings while levying short-term costs on businesses.

It seems certain Labour will shortly begin the process of selecting its next leader and the UK’s new prime minister – possibly Streeting himself – meaning the current government’s policy platform will lose some of its stickiness (not that stickiness has been a defining feature of policy under the leadership of Sir Keir Starmer).

Some business groups are sensing an opportunity to capitalise on a change in the political weather. UKHospitality has called for mandatory health reporting to be delayed, while the British Retail Consortium has called for a pause in the implementation of the new nutrient profiling model (NPM) which is likely to underpin a future healthy food standard at either a product or portfolio level.

Model dilemma

The 2018 model is significantly stricter than the current 2004/5 version in categorising less healthy foods. Analysis by IGD following the publication of last year’s health plan found that thousands of products currently sitting on the right side of the 2004 NPM – often as a result of industry reformulation – would be pulled into the HFSS (high in fat, sugar and salt) category under the 2018 model, often as a result of stricter rules around sugar content.

Business groups say they are worried about the cost of reengineering products to bring them within the acceptable boundaries of the new model as well as the restrictions brands will face in marketing products that fall foul of it (the 2004/05 NPM also underpins new restrictions on advertising and promoting HFSS food and drink). Concerns also relate to the feasibility of achieving a consistent, auditable approach to calculating free sugar content – a task full of technical complexity. A Labour leadership contender seeking to smooth relations with industry may be inclined to throw businesses a bone and punt the new NPM into the long grass.

Elsewhere, promised policies that could support dietary shifts continue to progress at a snail’s pace. The ‘Good food cycle’ food strategy identified how “a transparent, stable and predictable policy environment supports investment in the development, production and marketing of healthier and more environmentally sustainable great British food”. Yet still we await a plan for delivery almost a year after the astute diagnosis of food system challenges was published, driven by a food and farming minister, Daniel Zeichner, no longer in post.

The pledge that 50% of public sector food will be sourced locally or to higher environmental standards also remains stuck in the data collection phase two years after featuring in the Labour manifesto.

Climate-friendly diets

Indeed, along with measures designed to encourage healthy eating, there is little sign of the development of the kind of policies that will help drive the dietary shift needed to meet future climate goals (the overlap between diets that are both healthy and of low environmental impact is high).

Last year, the Climate Change Committee (CCC) published the seventh carbon budget, in which it set out the level of emissions reduction required by 2040 to keep the UK on track to achieve net-zero by 2050. Around a third of total emissions reduction relies on households making low-carbon choices. Out of these, 6% should come from an average reduction in meat and dairy consumption – far less than can be achieved by actions such as switching to electric vehicles and low-carbon heating systems but significant all the same.

By 2040, 25% of meat and 20% of dairy should have been replaced with lower-carbon foods, compared to 2019 consumption levels. These include vegetables, beans and pulses as well as meat and dairy alternatives. The reduction in meat and dairy goes beyond the existing long-term consumption trend; that means achieving it requires both a supportive policy environment as well as action on the part of businesses and citizens.

The CCC suggested a range of ways that meat and dairy alternatives can be made attractive and affordable to people, for example by increasing choice and availability of lower-carbon foods in public procurement, restaurant, and supermarket settings; making changes to product composition; expanding availability of alternative proteins; and ensuring lower-carbon alternatives are cheaper than meat and dairy products.

The UK Government has shown tentative support for alternative proteins by part-funding research hubs like the National Alternative Protein Innovation Centre. Ministers, however, continue to shy away from fiscal policies or information campaigns that support a shift to plant-rich diets.

In the absence of political leadership it’s been left to businesses to lead the charge. Foodservice operators are well placed to be the engine of growth in consumption of beans and pulses, both by scaling up 50-50 blended products and putting beans at the heart of recipe innovation.

In her crusade to get more people eating beans, Bold Bean Co. founder and CEO Amelia Christie-Miller has learned the limitations in relying on worthy messages around beans being low-carbon and good for the planet to drive trial and repeat purchasing. “People don’t eat with logic. They eat with desire,” she wrote on social media recently. “If you want to change behaviour, don’t educate. Make it irresistible!!”

This kind of insight from the coal face of consumer marketing suggests there are limits on the powers policy makers have to shift dietary choices at scale. Yet governments at the very least need to be on the field of play, working to remove the barriers.

One of these is supply. A plan for UK horticulture (along with a plan for poultry) is top of the list of priorities for the government’s new Farming and Food Partnership Board. Securing a resilient future supply of fruit and vegetables will be key to meeting the CCC’s proposed target for UK food production to account for at least 60% of the total through to 2050. In its recent assessment of UK climate risk, ‘A Well-adapted UK’, the CCC noted how around 18% of the UK’s fruit and vegetables come from nations at high and moderate risk to climate change. It added that without additional adaptation measures, under a 2°C global warming level in 2050, 52% of legumes and 47% of fruit are projected to be imported by the UK from climate vulnerable countries, increasing the likelihood of supply disruptions and shortages, and climate-related food price inflation.

A healthy food standard, support for alternative proteins, a plan for UK horticulture: the building blocks for a more sustainable national diet are there. What is seemingly still lacking is a government capable of putting them all together.