Malcolm Clark, co-ordinator of the Children's Food Campaign, said:
This new strategy to improve public health acknowledges the weaknesses of purely voluntary initiatives, and recognises that regulation is needed to tackle some of the food industry's worst offenders and marketing practices. Our campaign has been asking successive governments to implement strong regulation in this area for many years and so we welcome this move.
However, handing over the detail of their policies to the food industry and to advertising executives who write and oversee the implementation of marketing rules – as this strategy seems to be proposing – is a well-tried recipe for failure. It risks neutering the regulatory 'sticks' that are so desperately needed to bring in wholesale product reformulation and a rebalancing of marketing towards promoting healthy choices.
Restricting products high in fat, salt or sugar from being advertised before the 9pm watershed would be a simple, effective and popular move; at one stroke removing this advertising from all the shows on commercial TV most watched by children. So it is disappointing that Labour have not chosen to push immediately for this measure.
The strategy’s idea of maximum limits of fat, salt and sugar in foods marketed 'substantially' to children opens up an important debate on the definitions of marketing to children and of the age of a child. Setting those definitions will be a key test for the robustness of the policy.
The Children's Food Campaign has long been calling for the loopholes to be closed which currently allow junk food and sugary snacks and drinks to be marketed to children. We want Government to crack down on the use of child-friendly brand characters, advergames and misleading health and nutrition claims used to promote less healthy products and especially to target children. We also want to see the advertising rules extended to cover in-store placement and promotion of products, as well as universally strengthened to provide the same level of protection as the (hopefully improved) broadcast regulations would.
We also want to see Government adopt a 20 pence per litre sugary drinks duty. There is a growing public movement in favour of this policy, as well as academic modelling showing the predicted savings to the NHS and the change in consumer behaviour, and positive experience of other countries with similar taxes. In addition, the substantial potential income from such a duty could be used to pay for children's health initiatives.
Notes:
Family TV programmes saturated with junk food ads - briefing and the academic evidence
Children's Health Fund - the call for a sugary drinks duty to pay for programmes that improve children's health
Children's Food Campaign: Campaigning for policy changes so that all children can easily eat sustainable and healthy food.
