Mr Lansley has been at it again…….

Andy 'let them eat cake' Lansley

Health secretary Andrew Lansley came up against the acerbic reparte of the Foundry’s own Dave Thomas back when he was in opposition. His disparaging and needless remarks on Jamie Oliver’s attempt to encourage healthier eating in our kids though didn’t stop him taking up his new role as health secretary when the new government was formed (despite Dave’s best attempts). Private Eye hinted at close links between the then shadow health secretary and the Tesco Corporate affairs director, who certainly won’t have minded Oliver and hence Sainsbury’s taking a bit of a bashing. He was also a key player in seeing the eradication of traffic light labelling on foods via the European parliament, much to the dismay of organisations like Diabetes UK and the British Heart Foundation and allegedly at a cost of 1 billion Euro to the lobbying groups that so vehemently opposed it worried it might actually help people to select healthier options (or put them off buying the high margin crappy ones). Significant lobbying from the food industry probably shouldn’t be terribly surprising given that up until the end of 2009 Lansley himself was a paid Director on the board of Profero, an agency that represents (amongst others) Pepsi, Pizza Hut, and Mars. This man knows what he’s doing when it comes to representing the food industry, but the question is ‘does he know what he’s doing to improve public health?’

Mr Fox, would you mind watching my chickens for a while?

This week the excellent Felicity Lawrence, who has authored two investigative books on the food industry, revealed Lansley’s latest decision to take advice on deciding government policy from the likes of Unilever, PepsiCo, Mars, and other leading nutritional luminaries. This has been analogised in the article to putting the tobacco industry in charge of policy on smoking. Except it isn’t. It is much, much, worse. The Department of Health’s reluctance to legislate in favour of voluntary agreements is hard to reconcile with the overriding commercial interests of companies such as Macdonalds or Tesco. Really, this is letting the fox mind the chickens. You can be confident that the moment your back is turned the fox will be unable to resist its evolutionary nature and start laying into those tasty organic, free-range chickies.

Are we to believe that supermarkets and junk food retailers will behave any better? Will they truly subscribe to Dave Cameron’s message that we are ‘all in this together’ and put profits on the line for the greater public good ? It would seem that several of those involved in these ‘responsibility deals’ that Lansley has formed are worried they might not. Both Professor Ian Gilmore and Professor Tim Lang are cited as having real concerns about this union and I can’t say I blame them. Given that the responsibility group for alcohol is being chaired by the head of The Wine and Spirits Association, it is hard to see anything meaningful coming from this. Cutting down the problems with drink related illness, and the serious social issue of younger children abusing alcohol is diametrically opposed to the interest of the WSA members. As an interesting aside the Fitness Industry Association are involved, who according Ms Lawrence ‘represent personal trainers’. Well that is news to me and am sure it is news to the many fitness instructors in London currently earning beneath the London living wage, while their employers enjoy multi-million pound profits. However, that is a story for another day…

No nanny state for us, the truth though may be far more sinister….

Clearly Lansley is reluctant to look at legislating to improve public health, believing instead in personal responsibility. You have to wonder, does he have such incredible faith in human nature that everyone will just start ‘eating healthily and exercising more’ or does it suit the agendas of those who while paying lip service to healthier eating will continue to promote the obesity, illness, disease, and drink-related conditions that are overburdening our already creaking NHS? Clearly though the supermarkets and big food giants already have a strong link with those who decide food policy as DEFRA records clearly show in the meetings between civil servants and the PR machines of these companies. So, maybe it is as naive of us to think that government can set policy free of influence from the industry players, as it is to think that people will just magically change their dietary habits overnight. Personal responsibility of course must form part of the solution, after all, we can’t force people to eat more or to up their exercise. This is where the tobacco analogy does carry weight. When the public health risks of tobacco became clear the government took steadily more draconian measures to reduce it, taxing them more, controlling advertising methods, printing health warnings, and making it socially unacceptable to partake.

Something drastic needs to be done and this seems like more ‘quangos’ (wasn’t there something in the manifesto about getting rid of these ‘think tanks’) to sit around working out how to pay Paul without robbing Peter. Contrary to the Health Secretary’s stance, it is about a whole lot more than simply encouraging everyone to eat smaller portions and increase their activity levels through their strong moral sense of personal responsibility. These facile strategies alone simply don’t and won’t work.