No 10 pours cold water over junior health minister's sugar tax proposal

George Freeman, minister for life sciences, says although he is generally opposed to ‘heavy-handed legislation’, there is a case for action because of the role sugary products are playing in the growing obesity crisis. Photograph: Nick Ansell/PA

No 10 has moved swiftly to reprimand a junior health minister who proposed a tax on sugary food and drink to raise money to help the government meet the costs of tackling obesity.

The prime minister’s spokesman said George Freeman’s idea was not the right approach and that the Department of Health would be looking at other strategies to curb obesity.

Freeman, who as the new minister for life sciences divides his time between the health and business departments, floated the sugar tax idea during a talk at the Hay festival. He said although he was generally opposed to “heavy-handed legislation”, there was a case for action because of the role sugary drinks and snacks were playing in the obesity crisis.

George Freeman, MP for Mid-Norfolk. Photograph: Chris Radburn/PA

“Where there is a commercial product which confers costs on all of us as a society, as in sugar, and where we can clearly show that the use of that leads to huge pressures on social costs, then we could be looking at recouping some of that through taxation,” he said. “Companies should know that if you insist on selling those products, we will tax them.”

On Friday, Downing Street rejected the proposal. Insisting that there were no plans to introduce a sugar tax, the prime minister’s spokesman said imposing a tax “on hard-working people to increase the weight and cost of their shopping baskets” was not the right solution.

“We will continue with the approach that has been taken, which has been around working with the industry, working with public health bodies and the like,” the spokesman said, adding that Freeman was doing an excellent job as minister for life sciences.

In a speech earlier this week, Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, said tackling the “great scandal” of childhood obesity would be one of his priorities in this parliament. He is to publish a strategy for this in the coming weeks or months.

In the last parliament, rather than using tax to cut consumption of unhealthy foods, the government focused on its “responsibility deal” with producers, which saw them voluntarily agree to make their products healthier. But a recent study found that this approach had had little impact on nutrition-related health.