The 10 Year Health Plan for England was published this morning and, as promised, it includes a plan to monitor the food being sold in supermarkets which will be followed by mandatory targets compelling supermarkets to sell less food — or, more precisely, to sell fewer calories. Acting on a recommendation from those fools at Nesta, the government will fine retailers if they fail to deliver. Health secretary Wes Streeting thinks this as a liberal approach. “Less nanny, more nudge”, he tweeted on Sunday. “Less meddling from the state in supermarkets, more partnership WITH supermarkets.”
Fining businesses for not controlling what their customers buy doesn’t sound a lot like “less meddling” or “less nanny”, but I suppose it is preferable to putting big warning labels and regressive taxes on food, as the “public health” lobby would like him to do. We don’t know what the “mandatory targets” will be yet, but the idea is that supermarkets will simply sell us fewer calories and we will lose weight.
Wes Streeting said last week: “If everyone who is overweight reduced their calorie intake by around 200 calories a day — the equivalent of a bottle of fizzy drink — obesity would be halved.” He seems to think that people will reduce their calorie intake by this supposedly modest amount if shops nudge us towards healthy food. It is an extension of the previous government’s food reformulation wheeze which aimed to make us eat less by simply taking some calories out of the food we buy. It didn’t work because consumers noticed that the reformulated products tasted worse or had shrunk and bought something else instead. The plan now is to go after the middleman — the retailer — and the genius of the policy, as the government sees it, is that retailers will be permitted to use all their ingenuity to make it happen.
Targets will be mandatory but companies will have the freedom to work out how to achieve the target, whether through reformulation, by changing their layout, introducing new healthy products or through changes to customer incentive and loyalty schemes.
The government is so confident about this ruse that it says it will repeal the ban on the promotion of “less healthy” food at the end of supermarket aisles and it will repeal the ban on buy-one-get-one-free deals, which hasn’t even been introduced yet (it will still come into force in October as planned):
By introducing smarter regulation, focused on outcomes, we expect to be able to repeal legislation restricting volume price promotions and aisle placement.
Who needs the stick when you can use the carrot, albeit a carrot backed up by the threat of being hit with a stick?
The supermarkets are going along with this scheme to kick the can down the road, but it is doomed to fail for much the same reason as reformulation was doomed to fail. It rests on the cretinous belief that individuals have no agency and that corporations dictate what we buy. There is a whole quasi-academic literature on the “commercial determinants of health” that is rooted in the fallacy that supply leads to demand, rather than being a response to demand. It is a close cousin of the equally deluded belief that people would be more left-wing if only the most popular newspapers weren’t so right-wing. Both theories ignore the fact that people know what they want and the market responds. If the Daily Mail went left-wing, it would no longer be the best-selling newspaper. If Tesco sold nothing but state-approved, reformulated mush, it would go out of business. No amount of marketing is going to make diabetic biscuits popular.
Even if supermarkets had the power to make people eat low calorie food, the government will have removed most of the levers by which they can attempt to do so by the time mandatory targets are drawn up in 2029. The BOGOF ban starts in October, the advertising ban starts next January, and supermarkets are already legally prohibited from putting “less healthy” food at the entrance, exit and end-of-aisle. Food reformulation has already failed and supermarkets can only reformulate their own brands anyway. That just leaves the use of loyalty cards which hardly seems sufficient to halve obesity.
Mr Streeting’s “smarter regulation” will be as unsuccessful as all the stupid regulation that came before it
The plan has no chance of working and it would be a public health disaster if it did. Streeting imagines a country in which “everyone who is overweight reduced their calorie intake by around 200 calories a day”, but this policy doesn’t target the overweight. If supermarket nudges work with the overweight, they will work with everybody, and not everybody needs to reduce their calorie intake at all, let alone by 200 calories a day. Some people should be eating more. Using the proper clinical definitions, there are more underweight children in England than overweight children. If every child consumed around 70 fewer calories a day, there would be two more underweight children for every child who went from being overweight to a normal weight. If they consumed 200 fewer calories a day, the impact would be catastrophic.
You might say that this would never happen because people will ignore the nudges and eat what they want. And you would be right. That is why Mr Streeting’s “smarter regulation” will be as unsuccessful as all the stupid regulation that came before it.
