Food industry lobbying is leading Labour to drop public health plans, experts say | Health

Denis Campbell

Health policy editor

Labour has scrapped ambitious plans to tackle Britain’s growing toll of lifestyle-related illness after lobbying by food and alcohol firms, health experts have said.

Ministerial inaction on ill-health caused by bad diet, alcohol and smoking is so serious that the NHS could collapse as a result of conditions such as heart disease and diabetes, they warn.

Bold pledges Labour made before being elected to drive through a “prevention-first revolution” have been replaced by “diluted ambition” and a lack of leadership on the scourge of avoidable disease.

The charge against ministers has been made by Sarah Woolnough and Jennifer Dixon, the chief executives of the influential King’s Fund and Health Foundation thinktanks.

They welcome Labour moves on reducing smoking, banning junk food advertising to children and outlawing energy drink sales to under-16s in England. But they accuse ministers of lacking the “political courage” to implement radical policies to reduce the huge harm linked to unhealthy food, alcohol and air pollution.

They have said Labour are repeating the mistakes of previous governments by letting “vested interests” wield too much influence and water down planned policies.

“There is a long history of lobbying from the food, alcohol and tobacco industries weakening and delaying measures that would improve people’s health.

“And once again long-promised restrictions on junk food advertising have been delayed while Labour’s proposals to extend smoking restrictions to outdoor areas of pubs and restaurants were squashed,” Woolnough and Dixon say in a joint blog.

“Minimum unit pricing for alcohol – successfully implemented in Scotland – and a Clean Air Act, regularly promised by Labour in opposition, have both failed to materialise.”

Woolnough and Dixon single out the health secretary Wes Streeting’s threat to food firms in February 2024 that he would use a “steamroller” to force them to reformulate their products by putting less fat, salt and sugar in them. He has not acted on that pledge while in office, though, and instead published weaker plans intended to promote the take-up of more nutritious food.

“However, this steamroller appears to have been parked,” Woolnough and Dixon add – a decision they suggest is a mistake given strong public support for government action on poor diet.

Alcohol health charities voiced alarm in July when the government abandoned plans to include a ban on the advertising of alcohol products in its 10-year health plan. They did so after trade groups such as the British Beer and Pub Association warned of “extreme concern” in the drinks industry about it.

Similarly, plans to outlaw smoking outside pubs and restaurants as part of the tobacco and vapes bill were dropped last year after alcohol and hospitality groups objected.

While ministerial timidity has an impact on the nation’s health, employers and the economy, “this is also existential for the NHS”, according to Woolnough and Dixon.

“Health service leaders are telling us that unless we act on prevention, we may not have an NHS to fix,”Woolnough and Dixon said.

“There is a very real risk that it will collapse under the weight of avoidable illnesses such as heart disease, diabetes and other illnesses that are intimately associated with poor diet, drinking and smoking, and also largely preventable, unless the government acts boldly on these huge threats to the public’s health.”

Streeting has pledged that prevention rather than treatment of illness will be one of Labour’s “three big shifts” in health policy intended to make people healthier and rescue the NHS.

Progress of overhauling public health has been so disappointing that Labour’s declared “mission” to improve it has gone “missing in action”, Woolnough and Dixon said.

They point to a number of initiatives that are “absent or delayed” in Labour’s plans, including the child poverty strategy, use of regulation and taxation to make food healthier, minimum unit pricing of alcohol to deter the intake of high-strength drinks and legislation to tackle air pollution.

The Department of Health and Social Care rejected the thinktank bosses’ criticisms. A spokesperson said: “We are legislating to make sure children today can never legally smoke, introducing a ban on high-caffeine energy drinks for children and new rules to make baby food better for families, preventing fast food shops from setting up outside schools, banning junk food adverts targeted at children, introducing supervised toothbrushing to prevent kids teeth from rotting, a Healthy Food Standard to make the healthy choice the easy choice, and investing an extra £200m in the public health grant after years of cuts.”