A week ago the Department of Health’s executive body, Public Health England, quietly announced on its website that it had launched new talks with the food and drink industry and a raft of health groups about the need for a specific policy to reduce the nation’s sugar intake.

Following week after week of negative headlines about sugar in the press perhaps the meetings themselves were not a surprise - but the news that PHE planned to launch a new strategy on the same day as the much anticipated Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN) draft report of the evidence on carbohydrates - was.

In fact, industry sources were left reeling by the news, which they said threatened to not only put the kibosh on seven years of research in the form of the SACN report but also undermine even further the entire Responsibility Deal.

For health campaigners, such as Action on Sugar, this was the big breakthrough they were waiting for and although the meetings were staged behind closed doors, it is safe to say that the possibility of new targets on sugar reduction and more controversially the prospect of a sugar tax on fizzy drinks were discussed at great length.

However, it soon became clear that ministers have a very different attitude to PHE on raising the prospect of slapping a new tax on any product in the run up to a General Election, even one as much-maligned of late as parts of the soft drinks industry.

While PHE said a tax on fizzy drinks was being “considered alongside other measures that have the potential to be effective”, within hours the DH issued a rushed statement claiming that “the government is not considering a sugar tax”, and that it was looking forward to the SACN report and the debate it would produce.

No mention here of the need for a specific policy on sugar - more like ministers running for cover and reaching for the hard hats.

But we will not have long to wait and then this confusion should start to unravel.

If PHE ‘s new strategy document on 26 June includes a consultation on reformulation targets and a sugar tax, then the thousands of pages of research in the SACN report will be almost certainly overshadowed. If it doesn’t, then the health lobby will be quick to accuse PHE and the DH once more of being too close to the industry.

With yet another report out today claiming one third of adults in England were on the cusp of diabetes, the headlines on sugar are not about to go away, whichever version of events from the corridors of power turns out to be true.

This is a debate beyond the most accomplished of spin masters, let alone the DH.

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