The government has dropped a new impact assessment to accompany Wes Streeting’s 10-year NHS masterplan and frankly, it ought to come with its own health warning for many parts of the food industry.
Because if these proposals make it into law, they won’t just be tweaking the existing rules. They would be some of the biggest and most controversial moves to hit the industry on health in the past decade.
Streeting isn’t messing about: his plans would crank up the rules governing all of the major HFSS legislation the past two governments have brought in, as well as those that will underpin its future landmark plans for mandatory reporting and targets.
The move to switch to the now defunct Public Health England’s updated nutrient profiling model (which it put forward in 2018 only to gather dust in the Whitehall vaults), will spark an almighty fight with the food industry, who fear it will have disastrous impact.
That includes several businesses who have spent tens of millions, and countless hours, developing healthier products that will now find themselves unable to advertise on screen or online, or promote their products in prominent locations or multibuys in store.
Hard to swallow
Without question these proposals will reignite the row over the nanny state, and test whether Labour really is going to be an interventionist regulator on health.
And the timing couldn’t be more provocative, coming just over a week after the delayed HFSS advertising ban came into force. And with thousands of food companies still trying to get their heads around its (now potentially obsolete) rules, the latest move will be even harder for them to swallow.
Yet the impact assessment, which gives flesh to the bones of last summer’s 10-year health plan, is all about numbers. Health campaign groups who have been pressing for exactly this move will focus on the headline claim that the new NPM could have a dramatic impact on childhood obesity.
According to the DHSC, applying the updated model to the 9pm TV watershed and online ban for HFSS products, as well as the location and multibuy bans, could reduce calorie intake by as much as an additional 30 calories per day, versus the current model. That, it says, would reduce 170,000 cases of childhood obesity and 940,000 of adult obesity.
But here’s the rub: against more than a million new cases of obesity, a government that has said it will prioritise growth must now deal with the fallout for thousands of products that will now find themselves reclassified as unhealthy.
Public health row
Last year, FDF chief scientific officer Kate Halliwell warned MPs that hundreds of millions of pounds invested in reformulation could effectively be poured down the drain if the companies can no longer promote them in store, or advertise them on TV or online.
Food industry bosses also claim the levels of sugar reduction demanded by the 2018 NPM model are “simply not achievable” without disastrous changes to taste profiles or enormous sums in reformulation, which many businesses simply can’t afford.
The DHSC, however, insists its plans are firmly rooted in Labour’s commitment to reduce health inequalities among the poorest children, and health campaign groups will be queueing up to back Streeting’s tougher line.
The new documents also shed light on plans to introduce mandatory targets for a new healthy food standard across the UK’s biggest food companies. Based on Nesta’s “ambitious” target to elevate companies’ sales-weighted average converted NPM score to 69 or less (up from the current average of 67), the document says such a move could reduce obesity prevalence by around four percentage points.
Streeting is also sticking to his guns and reiterating his view, first revealed by The Grocer last year, that it doesn’t matter how those companies hit the targets. He’s previously said the government would ditch the promotions ban altogether if businesses can find other ways of making baskets healthier.
But only large companies, led by the major supermarkets, will be expected to hit these targets, leaving the long tail of smaller food firms untouched, for now. It’s yet another highly combustible ingredient in what promises to be the mother of all public health rows.
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