Following an extensive inquiry earlier this year, the House of Lords Food, Diet and Obesity Committee has published its report demanding the Government to develop a comprehensive, integrated long-term new strategy to fix our food system, underpinned by a new legislative framework.
The report, which summarises both written and oral evidence from a wide range of stakeholders, makes it abundantly clear that there is no silver bullet to address levels of overweight and obesity.
As such, it makes a series of bold yet achievable recommendations to the new Labour government to consider. We have picked out the recommendations that specifically address the four themes in Food Active’s policy calls, which were relaunched earlier this year. The full set of recommendations can be found on Pages 8-17.
Advocating for healthy weight in all policies through local, regional and national action.
- Swiftly introduce measures to give local authorities more planning and licensing powers to protect public health and reduce the proliferation of businesses that rely on sales of less healthy food.
- Develop a toolkit to support and accelerate local authority efforts to restrict outdoor HFSS advertising and encourage the spreading of good practice in advance of the comprehensive ban on advertising of HFSS food and drink coming into effect.
Reducing the availability, marketing and advertising of less healthy food and drink.
- Announce as soon as possible that it intends to uprate the Soft Drinks Industry Levy (SDIL) to keep pace with consumer price inflation since it was introduced and review the rate of the SDIL annually from now on. The Government should also reduce the current thresholds for the levy from 5g and 8g per 100ml to 4g and 7g per 100ml and bring sugary milk-based drinks into scope. The changes should be applied by April 2026 at the latest.
- Announce an intention to introduce a salt and sugar reformulation tax and apply it as soon as possible, and within two years at most.
- Legislate to ban the advertising of HFSS food and drink across all physical and digital media, as well as advertising by businesses that fail to reach mandatory health targets. This should be initiated no later than October 2026, culminating in a total ban by the end of this Parliament. As part of this, the Government should ban the sponsorship of sports events by and celebrity endorsements of large food businesses that fail to reach mandatory health targets.
- Bring forward the planned review of restrictions on retail location promotions, ensuring loopholes are closed and local authorities are adequately resourced to enforce the ban by the end of 2025;
- Implement the ban on HFSS volume price promotions no later than 1 October 2025 and restrict other forms of HFSS price promotion in retail settings, including ‘meal deals’
- Ban location and price promotions of HFSS food and drink by out-of home businesses with more than 50 employees, and for smaller out-of-home businesses and franchise premises if practicable;
- Ban location and price promotions of HFSS food and drink across online delivery platforms and aggregators, including digital messages and promotional notifications;
- Act swiftly to ban the use of brand and licensed characters, cartoons and nutrition and health claims on the packaging of HFSS food and drink. The Government should also ban these forms of promotion of HFSS products in retail and the out-of-home sectors as soon as possible;
- Legislate as soon as possible to implement its promised ban on the sale of energy drinks to children, ensuring the ban is comprehensive and providing adequate resources for it to be enforced.
- Legislate by the end of 2025 to set strong mandatory compositional and marketing standards for commercial infant foods. The policy must be determined independent of industry input.
- Introduce mandatory front-of-pack nutrition labelling that clearly distinguishes healthier and less healthy products, in a form determined by independent,
publicly funded research with UK consumers in real-world situations. A variety of labelling systems with evidence of success in other countries should
be trialled. Labels must be prominent and of a clearly readable size.
- Make prominent nutrition labelling mandatory for all businesses in the out-ofhome sector by the end of this Parliament, in a comparable form to labelling in the in-home sector. To help smaller businesses comply, the Government should make available a tool to help businesses assess the nutritional content of their
products.
- Act immediately to strengthen regulation on the composition and marketing of follow-on, toddler and growing up milks, banning the promotion of such
products.
Reducing the prevalence of food insecurity and increasing access to a healthy, sustainable and affordable diet for all.
- Introduce measures to make healthier food more affordable. To this end, the Government should urgently commission a comprehensive review of the evidence on the most cost-effective interventions to drive businesses to produce and market healthier, often unprocessed or minimally processed fruits and vegetables, legumes, nuts, seeds and whole grains and to drive up consumption of those foods. This should include consideration both of universal subsidies and of targeted measures to support people on low incomes.
- Immediately review the costs and benefits to nutrition and public health of increasing the value of Healthy Start payments to reflect increases in the prices of fruit, vegetables and milk;
- Enable auto-enrolment for Healthy Start over the course of this Parliament and in the meantime review evidence on and implement effective ways of encouraging eligible households to take up the scheme;
- Immediately review the costs and benefits to public health of extending eligibility for the Healthy Start scheme to all families earning under £20,000 per year.
- Immediately review the costs and benefits to public health of increasing the per-meal free school meals funding rate to account for food price inflation since 2014–15.
- Immediately review the costs and benefits to public health of extending free or subsidised school meal provision, including extending eligibility for free school meals to children in all families with an income of £20,000 per year or less.
- Remove technical barriers to auto-enrolment for free school meals over the course of this Parliament. In the meantime, the Government should disseminate good practice on auto-enrolment for local authorities.
- Ensure that families eligible for free school meals receive holiday food support at no less than the value of free school meals following the end of the current funding settlement for the Holiday Activities and Food programme.
Promoting inclusive healthy weight environments and settings.
- Immediately review food standards for early years settings, making them mandatory, supporting early years settings to meet them and establishing a performance framework.
- Immediately review and update the school food standards: bringing them into line with SACN’s advice on dietary intakes of free sugars and fibre; setting out that schools should always make drinking water freely available and should offer no drinks except water and milk; and providing guidance on how the standards apply to school breakfasts as they are rolled out.
- Introduce a system by the end of 2025 for monitoring compliance with the school food standards. The results of compliance checks should be published online. Compliance checks should be introduced for early years settings by the end of this Parliament.
- Immediately take forward reforms to the Government Buying Standards for Food and Catering Services to ensure that schools as well as other public sector organisations must procure healthier food. In the meantime, the Government should introduce guidance on best practice for procuring healthy catering services for schools and local authorities.
READ THE FULL REPORT HERE
Whilst the recommendations are far-ranging, there are still some important areas that the report didn’t address, including an uplift to the public health grant and multi-year funding agreeements to help local authorities plan services and resources efficiently. Another missed opportunity is measures to tackle weight stigma and bias. As well as submitting written evidence to the inquiry, Food Active we also invited to provide oral evidence during a committee site visit to Blackpool Council (see Page 171).
Food Active’s Policy and Advocacy Manager, Beth Bradshaw responds:
“We strongly welcome the comprehensive and ambitious set of recommendations made in the House of Lord’s Recipe for Health report; from closing loopholes of current legislation to restrict less healthy products at the checkout, to expanding the successful Soft Drinks Industry Levy to more tools and power to support local authorities to restrict the advertising of less healthy food and drink. These are timely recommendations for the new government to consider as part of their mission to create the healthiest generation of children and build an NHS fit for the future.”
All eyes are now on the government, who must respond within the next two months to the report. We look forward to seeing whether they rise up to the challenge and show they are serious in finally turning the tide on levels of overweight and obesity.
