Late last year, I emailed you asking for your opinion on Jamie Oliver’s proposed sugar tax.
Gaynor supported the tax because it would be ‘one of the simplest and easiest ways to discourage the ingestion of sugar’ while Reji wrote that it makes sense to have a sugar tax, and the money generated should be used to tackle obesity and other related illnesses. Julian, who opposed the tax, said that ‘adding a tax to sugar isn’t going to reduce the consumption of sugar but will make everything in foods and drink cost more’. Caroline added that educating people about the dangers of these high sugar drinks is a better way forward. The average Brit consumes a pound of sugar every week. What’s scariest is that even food being advertised as ‘healthy food’ contains excessive amounts of sugar. At first, my liberal instinct was that if you want to mess up your own health you should be free to do so and the state should not tell you how to live your life. What’s made me change my mind is the lack of information that is preventing people from making a real conscious choice. Like Nick Clegg recently said: ‘If you don’t know what you’re really eating — or you have to have a PhD in nutrition to interpret the information on the packaging — it’s harder to exercise true freedom of choice.’ A sugar tax is not the solution to our nation’s health problems but it is a step in the right direction. Experts believe a tax of just 7p per regular-sized can of soft drink with added sugar could generate £1 billion per year. This crucial revenue should be ring-fenced to support much needed preventative strategies in the NHS and schools around childhood obesity and diet-related disease. This should however not be an excuse for inaction on other fronts. We should look to stop targeted advertising at children, impose limits on heavy-handed marketing, reduce portion sizes and especially give consumers simpler descriptions so that we can see how many teaspoons of sugar are contained in the yoghurt or juices we buy. I am pleased that we are having this sugar debate and I thank everyone who responded to the epoll. Yours sincerely, Tom Brake MP |