Food industry is lobbying hard to head off regulation

The enormous scale of the British food industry’s lobbying in Whitehall to resist growing pressure for regulation to tackle obesity and diet-related diseases has emerged.

A day before the release of the Common’s health committee’s long-awaited report into obesity, the Guardian published letters under the open government code to show how advertisers and manufacturers have been directly accessing government to safeguard their commercial interests.

They reveal that last year food manufacturers’ lobbying group the Food and Drink Federation alone had over 2,000 contacts with ministers, MPs, lords, MEPs, MSPs and special advisers.

A letter from industry was sent to Downing Street less than two weeks before publication of the health committee report from signatories including the chairman of Cadbury Schweppes and newly appointed head of the CBI John Sunderland. According to the Guardian it suggests that in the face of the MPs’ criticisms the government should concentrate on a voluntary ‘joint public health campaign’ with ‘some sort of government endorsed symbol’ which would promote ‘10 tips for better health’.

Instead of statutory labelling of food detrimental to health, it said the campaign should stress the importance of exercise and of individual responsibility such as ‘check out lower salt/sugar/fat choices’.

The health committee’s report calculated that obesity and overweight people cost the nation up to £7.4bn per year, a figure that would ‘rapidly rise’. It said obesity would soon overtake tobacco as the greatest cause of premature death in England and that it was ‘staggering to realise that on present trends half of all children in England in 2020 could be obese’.

While damning of the government’s ‘woefully inadequate’ response to obesity, it stopped short of calling for an immediate ban on all television advertising of unhealthy food to children and recommended a voluntary withdrawal by industry instead.

The report also recommended legislation to set up a ‘traffic light’ system for labelling foods based on energy density but did not recommend any specific action to target sugar and fat separately. The government should focus on voluntary arrangements with industry to reduce the overall energy density of foods, it said.

The voluntary measures by industry should be reviewed after three years to see if more direct regulation was required, the report concluded.

Other recommendations included a health education campaign, action to reduce the promotion and availability of unhealthy food in schools and for the government to use its influence and its forthcoming presidency of the EU to press for a review of the Common Agricultural Policy.