The more regulations people are subjected to, the less notice they take, argues Kevin Hawkins


It's been a bad month for the nanny state, particularly for those of its functionaries whose raison d'être is exhorting the rest of us to eat less of this and more of that. Ten years ago, food retailers and manufacturers welcomed the establishment of the Food Standards Agency in the belief it would help resolve food safety problems faster and more objectively than the discredited Ministry of Agriculture.

We did, however, argue strongly that it should not have a role in nutritional issues, where the science was both relatively unsophisticated and open to more subjective influences. Recent events suggest we were right.

Nutritional policy if we are going to have it at all should always be based on hard scientific evidence. For nearly 20 years the entire edifice of nutritional interventionism has stood on the COMA recommendations for daily calorie intake.

Now it appears that the methodology on which these figures were based was flawed. In the interim, a sub-stream of messianic campaigning has flourished around nutritional labelling. This, too, has shaky foundations, being based on the scientifically unproven belief that the information on a colour-coded product label will induce those consumers who should be eating less of this and more of that to translate it into their weekly shop.

It therefore came as no surprise to some of us when last month the Oxford study reported that traffic-light labels had no effect on consumers' choice of "healthy" sandwiches and ready meals.

The problem for the FSA is that it has allowed itself to become a partisan advocate not just of colour-coding in principle but of one particular form of it. Its new, no-nonsense chairman apparently wants it to refocus on food safety and, by implication, turn down the volume on nutritional advocacy. Good for him. The underlying issue, however, remains that of public trust in government and its agencies.

The more rules, regulations and top-down exhortation to which we are daily subjected, the less trust we have in the state and its bureaucracy. It also exposes yet again the systemic limitations of government by quango, or what Camilla Cavendish has termed Parkinson's Second Law that meetings, reports, vanity projects and valueless activity expand to fill the budget available. Hopefully we'll see a lot less of this in the next few years.

Kevin Hawkins is an independent retail consultant.