CMO report highlights the big fat divide between industry and government obesity ideas

The Department of Health has been desperately keen in the past to play down reports that the government’s top medical adviser wants to see taxes slapped on more products than just soft drinks.

When Dame Sally Davies let the idea slip in an interview on the Today programme in May, we were told the comments had been taken out of context. This was just the chief medical officer wanting all parties, including businesses, to start thinking outside the box, said the DH.

Well good luck to them spinning that line after today’s report by Davies called on the government to bring in plain packaging for junk food, as part of a recipe of taxation and other financial regulation aimed at providing a stick to the voluntary reformulation programme’s carrot. 

The report exposes the true extent to which the government’s ministers are at odds with its advisers (Davies and PHE among them) over how far regulation and intervention should go to tackle the UK’s obesity crisis.

This is a report, let us not forget, that was commissioned by health secretary Matt Hancock, a man who has attacked the ‘nanny state’ and is a key ally of a prime minister who’s gone on the record to criticise so-called ‘sin taxes’ like the sugar levy.

Yet Davies suggests the voluntary programme launched under Theresa May’s Childhood Obesity Plan back in 2016 has failed, just like its predecessor the Responsibility Deal, in her eyes.

Trillion calories cut since 2015, claim food and drink companies

Far from bowing to industry calls for the bombardment of reformulation targets on sugar, fat and salt to be slowed, the CMO says they should be accelerated. 

Predictably, the CMO’s report seizes on the figures from last month’s announcement by PHE. These showed the first two years of the sugar reduction programme had seen levels in key products cut by less than 3%, while products covered by the soft drinks sugar tax achieved reductions of almost 30% in the same period.

But Davies doesn’t just want the sugar tax extended to other products such as sugary milk drinks. She suggests a post-Brexit onslaught against unhealthy products, with a shake-up of the VAT rules to make sure they are always more expensive than healthier alternatives.

The CMO even wants the government to base all its future trade agreements on making sure they are geared around products that are healthier (again, good luck to those negotiating with Donald Trump and his cronies on that one).

With such ideas in mind, it’s tempting to dismiss the CMO’s proposals as the last ravings of the ‘chief nanny’ before she is carted off. She even proposes a ban on eating and drinking on urban public transport (except fresh water, breastfeeding and for medical conditions). Given the average delays one experiences on public transport, this is perhaps one way to tackle obesity – through starvation – but it is quite an extreme one.

The CMO is of course stepping down from her role, and the report reflects a desire to go out all guns blazing. Yet plenty more in PHE and the NHS share her view – and today is more evidence that the relationship between the food and drink industry and the government’s medical experts is at breaking point. 

How can the industry work meaningfully on voluntary reduction programmes when the people they are speaking to would like to see their products sold in plain packaging?

It’s another fine mess for Boris Johnson to sort out – as if he didn’t already have enough of those on his plate.