In January 2006, a newly elected Tory leader made a speech that is remembered for a single question: “As Britain faces an obesity crisis, why does WH Smith promote half-price Chocolate Oranges at its checkouts instead of real oranges?” David Cameron asked.
He knew the answer. Chocolate sells. The impulse to grab a sugary snack overcomes the will to choose something more nutritious. Consumer and retailer alike face powerful incentives to have unhealthy food in easy reach. But Mr Cameron was reluctant to propose regulation, since that was not the Conservative way.
Little has changed. A government strategy for dealing with childhood obesity, published this week, has been ridiculed by health experts and campaigners for the flimsiness of its prescriptions. A tax on sugary soft drinks survives from George Osborne’s last budget, but a ban on the promotion of trashy food to children has been rejected. Targets to reduce the sugar content of food will be voluntary. The most revealing criticism has come from Mike Couple, chief executive of Sainsbury’s, who urged the prime minister to embrace a culture of compulsion – forcing everyone in the market to trade in healthier food. If popular junk options are still available from rival outlets, there is less incentive to risk the investment in new abstemious products.
This is a case where the collective interest of the nation’s health (and the financial interest of the taxpayer, who pays when obese children become chronically ill adults) overrides the rights of individual companies to sell whatever they want to whomever they want. Manufacturers of processed foods increasingly resemble the tobacco lobby – reluctant to admit that their product is poisonous, insistent that consumer choice is paramount. The analogy is strengthened by neurological research suggesting the extreme compulsion to keep eating sugary, fatty, salty food amounts to a kind of addiction.
This is more than a one-off challenge for the prime minister. It is a test case for her entire political creed. Theresa May arrived in Downing Street with a pledge to rehabilitate her party’s one-nation tradition: none would be economically or socially excluded. For a generation, the Conservative approach to this task has rested on the presumption that the state is usually an obstacle to progress and that the best way for government to help people is to get out of their way.
An issue such as childhood obesity demonstrates the limitations of that view. The new strategy acknowledges that the problem is most severe among children in low-income backgrounds in deprived areas. Ill health and poor nutrition are a function of what a seminal 2007 report called the “obesogenic environment” – the panoply of economic and social factors that militate against healthy eating. Politely requesting changes in behaviour, whether by consumers, retailers or industry, is futile. Mr Cameron once thought behavioural psychology offered a middle way between state meddling and inaction. People might be “nudged” into better choices by ruses stopping short of regulation. That approach can be effective at the margins, but delicate psychological prodding cannot engineer drastic shifts in social norms and economic structures.
In other respects, Mrs May sees the value of intervention where once her party was wedded to an ethos of laissez-faire. She supports an activist “industrial strategy” in recognition that voters expect government to play more than a bystander’s role when market forces are shaping national destiny. Is she ready to contemplate an equivalent gear change in social policy?
It isn’t easy, as was made clear earlier this month in a leaked report evaluating the “troubled families” programme. This scheme was much lauded by Mr Cameron as the antidote to social dysfunction, thought to be incubated in a few tens of thousand of homes. It evolved into a checklist reduction in unemployment, truancy and criminal behaviour in the target families, but the return on investment has been poor. (“No discernible impact,” the report’s author wrote.) Notionally, households have been “turned around”, but that is a bureaucratic judgment to satisfy funding requirements more than an indicator of real transformation. Defenders of the scheme say it is too early to judge the impact. Supportive critics say the intention is good but the funding inadequate. None can deny there is a problem.
Meanwhile, the numbers positing government retreat as the solution are dwindling, even in Tory circles. To her credit, Mrs May has taken a pragmatic position on the role of the state in nurturing economic success. She should apply the same insight when it comes to the strategic role government can play in repairing society.
