The public want leadership to help battle our costly junk food addiction

This is my piece in Today's Time Red Box...

Everyone knows junk-food BOGOFFs are a total swindle, preying on our cravings and encouraging us to buy food that doesn’t sell at full price and that we do not need.

As a father of four, my heart sinks when they target my seven-year-old by placing sugary snack promotions directly in his eye-line, and cause a pointless argument.

And everyone knows junk-food advertising targets kids on their way back from school. My blood boils every time an endlessly-hungry teenager succumbs to junk-food cravings and orders another cheeseburger loaded with all the unhealthy gubbins.

Supermarkets are so competitive that multi-buys are on the way out. Many are for healthy food: “two for ￡2” for avocados, blueberries and grapes at ASDA, for instance. No doubt about it, these definitely help families looking for good value. Long may they continue.

But it’s the tempting promotions for chocolates, crisps and other junk food that are so pernicious. Foods with high fat, sugar and salt are addictive. So these promotions lure households into buying more food than they perhaps need, and tempt them away from healthy options and towards so-called “treats” that ultimately contribute to obesity and poor health.

I feel this issue personally. As health minister in the pandemic, I saw at first hand the impact of Britain’s obesity crises on our overweight population and, therefore, our struggling hospitals. There’s no doubt we had more days of lockdown because this country was too heavy.

I appreciate the genuine concerns of those worried about the spiralling cost of living. I realise the pressures on households are intense. Those watching the backs of hard-working families are right to push back against anything that adds to household costs.

But fighting the junk-food BOGOFF ban does not make sense on cost-of-living grounds. The government’s own impact assessment makes it clear, “although price promotions appear to be mechanisms to help consumers save money, data shows that they increase consumer spending by encouraging people to buy more than they intended to buy in the first place.”

Some of my parliamentary colleagues are fighting against “nanny state gone mad”. I sympathise with the sentiment. As a lifelong Conservative, I fight unnecessary redtape shoulder-to-shoulder with my fellow Tory.

As the minister overseeing vaccine regulation, I made sure our regulators used the opportunities presented by Brexit to parallel-process their assessments and fast-track their sign-off processes. This meant Britain could beat the world to be the first major country rolling-out population-wide jabs.

But with the economy tipping into recession and the healthcare system heaving under the backlog, it is totally “un-Conservative” to battle for out-of-date junk-food promotions that are costing taxpayers a fortune and contributing to personal misery.

For me, there are strong Conservative reasons for these measures.

Good health is the foundation of freedom.

Without good health, people find it hard to fulfill their potential in almost every field of life.

They are less economically productive, less able to create and care for a family, more likely to need medical and financial support from the state, and more likely to die young.

Voters understand that bad health is oppressive. It hits your earnings, your self-worth and your ability to care for your family. Like the effects of crime, it hurts the poorest the most.

Shockingly, poor diet is now the leading cause of preventable disease and death in this country, and most other developed countries. Bad food is much bigger killer than smoking.

I understand that junk food in moderation can be delicious – icecream is my favourite dish. But it is hugely addictive - we have all felt those irresistible cravings when we are eating too junk. It’s no surprise that Brits eat just 2.2bn of fresh fruit and veg, but eat a staggering ￡3.9bn of sweets, (one small subsection of the junk food market).

At a time of economic challenge, it is the financial costs to taxpayers that really worries me. It is estimated that the NHS spent ￡6.1 billion on overweight and obesity-related ill-health in 2014 to 2015. Annual spend on the treatment of obesity and diabetes is greater than the amount spent on the police, the fire service and the judicial system combined.

?More broadly, obesity has a serious impact on economic development. The overall cost of obesity to wider society is estimated at ￡27 billion. The UK-wide NHS costs attributable to overweight and obesity are projected to reach ￡9.7 billion by 2050, with wider costs to society estimated to reach ￡49.9 billion per year.

The NHS spends 40 per cent of its budget treating preventable conditions. We spend too much time on the symptoms of ill health and too little time addressing the causes.

The junk-food BOGOFF and advertising restrictions were important steps in turning around Britain’s obesity crisis. If the Government backs off on this fully-legislated step, I worry whether we will have the commitment to actually do enough to address this problem. So this is my message to those who are defending BOGOFFS.

Everyone can see that Britain's food system and culture is economically unproductive. People want change. Let’s have the courage to do what’s right for the country.

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Lord Bethell is former Minister for Innovation at the Department for Health and Social Care.?