The House of Lords Food, Diet and Obesity Committee has demanded that the Government should develop a comprehensive, integrated long-term new strategy to “fix the UK food system”, underpinned by a new legislative framework.
This is the key conclusion of the Committee’s report, Recipe for health: a plan to fix our broken food system.
The report found that obesity and diet-related disease are, what it said, a public health emergency that costs society billions each year in healthcare costs and lost productivity.
Chair’s comments
Baroness Walmsley, chair of the Food, Diet and Obesity Committee, said: “Food should be a pleasure and contribute to our health and wellbeing, but it is making too many people ill. Something must be going wrong if almost two in five children are leaving primary school overweight or obese and so many people are finding it hard to feed healthy food to their families. That is why we took a root and branch look at the food system and analysed what had gone wrong over the past few decades.
“Over the last 30 years successive governments have failed to reduce obesity rates, despite hundreds of policy initiatives. This failure is largely due to policies that focused on personal choice and responsibility out of misguided fears of the ‘nanny state’. Both the Government and the food industry must take responsibility for what has gone wrong and take urgent steps to put it right.
“We hope, given the recent comments from the Prime Minister, Lord Darzi and the Secretary of State for Health, that there is now an appetite to shift towards prevention of ill health. We urge the Government to look favourably on our plan to fix our broken food system and accept that not only is it cost-effective, but that it would lead to a lot less human misery.”
Key recommendations
As part of the new comprehensive strategy, the Lords report said Government should:
- Make large food businesses report on the healthiness of their sales and exclude businesses that derive more than a defined share of sales from less healthy products from any discussions on the formation of policy on food, diet and obesity prevention.
- Give the Food Standards Agency (FSA) independent oversight of the food system.
- Introduce a salt and sugar reformulation tax on food manufacturers, building on the success of the Soft Drinks Industry Levy. The Government should consider how to use the revenue to make healthier food cheaper, particularly for people living with food insecurity.
- Ban the advertising of less healthy food across all media by the end of this Parliament, following the planned 9pm watershed and ban on paid-for online advertising in October 2025.
- Commission further research into the links between ultra-processed foods (UPFs) and adverse health outcomes and review dietary guidelines to reflect any new evidence. The rapidly growing body of epidemiological evidence showing correlation between consumption of UPFs and poor health outcomes is alarming. Beyond energy and nutrient content, causal links between other properties of UPFs and poor health outcomes have not at the present time been clearly demonstrated. To understand any links, more research is needed.
- Immediately develop an ambitious strategy for maternal and infant nutrition and drive up compliance with the school food standards. This will reportedly help break the “vicious cycle” by which children living with obesity are five times more likely to become adults with obesity.
- Enable auto-enrolment for Healthy Start and free school meals and review the costs and benefits to public health of increasing funding and widening eligibility for both schemes. It said this is “essential” to help families living in poverty afford healthy food and to “begin closing the gaping inequalities” in unhealthy diets and obesity rates.
The report notes that:
- Two-thirds of adults are overweight and just under a third are living with obesity.
- After tobacco, diet-related risks now make the biggest contribution to years of life lost. The annual societal cost of obesity is at least 1–2% of UK GDP.
- Unhealthy diets are the primary driver of obesity, with people in all income groups failing to meet dietary recommendations.
- There has been an “utter failure to tackle this crisis”. Between 1992 and 2020, successive governments proposed nearly 700 wide-ranging policies to tackle obesity in England, but obesity rates have continued to rise.
- The food industry has “strong incentives” to produce and sell highly profitable unhealthy products. Voluntary efforts to promote healthier food have failed. Mandatory regulation has to be introduced.
