The Demon in the Can

The sugar tax six years on: did it work? Text by Professor Karen Throsby. Illustration by Sinjin Li.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles Season 7: Food and Policy. Each essay in this season investigates how policy intersects with eating, cooking and life. Our fourteenth focus for this season is the 2018 sugar tax introduced in the UK. In our first article, Professor Karen Throsby writes about the sugar tax as a policy that over-promised the benefits it could deliver, shifting the blame for complex health and social problems onto individual consumers. In part 2, Jonathan Nunn, Amelia Horgan, Ophira Gottlieb, Owen Hatherley and Rebecca May Johnson look at another aspect of the sugar tax: how the reformulation of their favourite soft drinks to circumvent the tax, and the additions of artificial sweeteners, have made them inaccessible and undrinkable.

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The Demon in the Can

The sugar tax six years on. Did it work? Text by Professor Karen Throsby. Illustration by Sinjin Li.

If you went into a shop in early 2018 and bought a can each of Irn-Bru and Coca-Cola, you would have encountered two different strategic responses to a change in food policy. Both soft drinks would still have had their familiar branding and colour, but they would have no longer been quite the same. If you looked at the ingredients on the bottle, you would have discovered that the Irn-Bru had been reformulated to replace the sugar with the sweetener aspartame. In spite of market research showing that most consumers can’t tell the difference, outraged fans stockpiled the original recipe bottles, signed an angry ‘Hands off our Irn-Bru’ petition, and branded celebrity chef and anti-sugar campaigner Jamie Oliver a ‘lettuce shagger’. Meanwhile, with the 1985 marketing disaster of ‘new Coke’ still fresh in their minds, Coca-Cola chose a different path. It stuck with the classic recipe, but made the bottle smaller and sold it at a higher price to absorb the costs of the tax.

In his budget speech on 16 March 2016, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, announced plans to introduce a Soft Drinks Industry Levy – more commonly known as the ‘sugar tax’ – which would come into place in 2018. The tax would add an additional duty of 24 pence per litre for drinks with more than 8g of sugar per 100ml, and 18 pence per litre for those with 5–8g per 100ml. This marked a key turning point sugar’s recent rise to dietary infamy in the UK – it had already supplanted fat as the food enemy du jour – but this new levy revived the flagging ‘war on obesity’ which had as yet failed to achieve its goals. During all this, anti-sugar and anti-obesity campaigners were jubilant. Jamie Oliver was reported in the Sunday Times as having ‘parked his Vespa on Parliament Square and strolled towards a scrum of television cameras’, before removing his helmet and dancing ‘a jig of joy’ for the watching press. Meanwhile Osborne was in parliament, faced with the unpopular task of introducing a new tax, while also positioning himself as a brave leader fuelled by moral obligation to future generations. He declared: ‘I am not prepared to look back at my time here … and say to my children’s generation … we knew there was a problem with sugary drinks … and we did nothing.’ And the UK was not alone in its decision: by 2021, over 45 countries, regions and cities had introduced some form of taxation on sugar-sweetened beverages.      

Jamie Oliver was reported in the Sunday Times as having ‘parked his Vespa on Parliament Square and strolled towards a scrum of television cameras’ and dancing ‘a jig of joy’

The announcement of the sugar tax was hot news in the UK. For some opponents, it was the epitome of ‘nanny state’ interference. Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg denounced the tax as ‘absurd, nannying, puritanical cobblers’^[1]. Others embraced the accusation, and in December 2018 England’s Chief Medical Officer, Dame Sally Davies, recommended extending the tax to other high-sugar products, describing herself as the ‘chief nanny’. But even while voices of dissent made for good copy, the tone of the reporting was largely positive, with the tax framed as striking a brave blow for child health in the face of industry opposition. As the World Health Organisation argued in 2017, the promised benefits included obesity prevention and reduction, reduced healthcare costs, increased revenues for the promotion of public health, and the distribution of the greatest benefits to those with the lowest incomes (since they were most likely to suffer from the chronic diseases commonly associated with sugar consumption and obesity). In short, the sugar tax was presented as a win for everyone, with the Conservative government gaining additional political capital from the appearance of standing up to an increasingly unpopular food industry in the interests of public health.

But what gets lost in the collective pursuit of a single-nutrient solution to complex health and social problems? What other agendas might the consensus around the sugar tax be enabling? This is not to argue that there is a great conspiracy at work, and nor is it to stand in defence of the sugar industry, whose commitment to profit trumps all. Instead, it is to suggest that sugar reduction through taxation has provided a convenient lowest-common-denominator platform around which multiple agendas can coalesce. Fatphobia, classism, and the imperative to ‘do something’ have pushed the lived realities of those most disadvantaged quietly into the background.

Food and drink choices are never only about nutritional content; they are also about taste, preference, habit, identity, and pleasure in ways that can never be contained by the logics of taxation and reformulation. There is no space in such policies for the mother who, living in grinding poverty, buys her child a sugary treat that she can’t really afford in order to make straitened times more bearable, or for the exhausted worker enjoying the comfort of a favourite chocolate bar or soft drink at the end of a long day. With the sugar tax, food and drink are stripped of their social value – as acts of love, care, comfort, or celebration – and are reduced to their nutrients. The social context that frames and motivates food choice has to be disregarded for this platform to be maintained.

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The case against the sugar tax

The case for the sugar tax rests on the assumption that it will reduce population-level rates of obesity and the disease’s associated health problems. However, even five years after the tax’s introduction, there is no substantial evidence of measurable health improvements or weight loss in the UK: there were only modest weight changes for some groups (and no clear causative relationship between this and the tax). In the absence of promised health benefits in the present, three other measures serve as proxies for success, bridging the gap between the predicted health outcomes and reality, and smoothing over uncertainty to maintain support for the tax.

Did the sugar tax increase heath outcomes?

The first proxy for success is reduced sugar consumption, either through product reformulation to bring sugar content below the levy threshold, or the deterrent effect that higher prices on unreformulated products have on consumers. For example, in 2020, Public Health England reported that, between 2015 and 2019, there was a 35.4% decrease in total sugar sales from soft drinks, with consumers increasing their intake of low-sugar versions, which was then assumed to translate into health benefits. Before the policy had come in, newspapers and public health journals were awash with extravagant estimates of the impacts of reduced consumption. For example, as early as 2013, the British Medical Journal argued that a 20% tax would reduce obesity prevalence by approximately 180,000 people, while in 2016, Cancer Research UK predicted it would prevent 3.7 million cases of obesity by 2025. The overflowing optimism of these predictions meant that when the tax was launched in 2018, a Treasury press release was able to pronounce the scheme a success before it had even started: 50% of manufacturers had already reformulated products to avoid the levy, removing an estimated 45 million kg of sugar from the food supply every year. In 2020, Public Health England was similarly triumphant, noting a 43.7% reduction in the total sugar content of drinks subject to the tax and a 35.2% fall in the calorie intake likely to be consumed on a single occasion. Such celebratory announcements by government bodies were buoyant with the certainty that although these benefits hadn’t manifested yet, it was only a matter of time before they would. 

A key factor sustaining the optimistic speculation that reduced sugar will equate to wide-reaching health benefits is the confident claim that, when future health impacts are finally realised, the most disadvantaged will be their first beneficiaries. In 2016, the Guardian cited Simon Capewell of the UK’s Faculty of Public Health, who offered this back-of-an-envelope calculation:

If you apply a sugary drinks tax across the board and everybody consumes 10% less, that produces a 1% reduction in disease overall. But in poorer areas that would be a three-times-bigger reduction compared with more affluent areas, because poorer people are two to three times more likely to get heart disease, diabetes, obesity, cancer or to have a stroke […] Poorer people would benefit more from a sugary-drinks tax, so it would be progressive in health terms and not regressive in financial terms to any significant degree.’

It is important to recall that the sugar tax was being debated and implemented while the UK was living with the impact of austerity policies. These imposed significant cuts to public services and the welfare system, impacting directly on the most disadvantaged in society, who were targeted as ‘scroungers’ overconsuming scarce public resources. Capewell’s calculation reproduces austerity’s sleight of hand, positioning ‘poorer people’ as both the perpetrators of damaging overconsumption (of public resources, of sugar-laden foods) and the bearers of the responsibility for solving those problems (by changing their behaviours). This narrative of requiring ‘poorer people’ to live differently promises to cushion the effects of their poverty, but does not address its causes. Capewell’s statement also begs the question: If poorer people are more likely to have bad health, why not address their poverty rather than their sugar consumption? The sugar tax leaves no space for such questions, holding those social inequalities in place.

Did the sugar tax raise money for healthcare?

The second proxy for the policy’s success is its anticipated financial benefits, including both promised savings in healthcare costs and the generation of revenue which can be ring-fenced for health-related interventions. For example, in November 2018, a Treasury press release announced that the tax had generated an additional £153.8 million since its introduction in April that year, which Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, Robert Jenrick, described as ‘helping our next generation to have a healthy and active childhood’. The promise of future health-related investment was key to securing public support for the sugar tax, and in his 2016 budget speech, George Osborne promised to use the additional revenue to double the funding dedicated to primary school sport and to support healthy school breakfast clubs (since then, the funds have been theoretically ‘spent’ many times over in public announcements and news reporting). Osborne’s claim insulates the sugar tax against its own failures by promising health gains by other means, and in turn these speculative benefits provide political cover for the purposeful and sustained underfunding of services.

In reality, there have been no guarantees that the revenues will reach their declared destinations, and in 2021, food campaigning organisation Sustain protested angrily that £700 million of the funds raised by the sugar tax since 2018 has been unaccounted for. This disappearing cash demonstrates the ways in which the sugar tax’s surplus funds are not always used in the interests of the promised beneficiaries. Instead, they have provided political cover, allowing the government to get away with decimating the public services that the sugar tax revenue was allegedly destined to support.

Did the sugar tax change the food system?

The final, and most nebulous, proxy for success is the very fact of the sugar tax. For a Conservative government frequently accused of cowardly inaction in the face of the powerful soft drinks lobby, the sugar tax was an opportunity to gain political capital by making a very public shot across the bows of the soft drinks and junk food industries. Jamie Oliver explained this in his 2018 Guardian piece, noting that ‘The best bit is that it’s the first time government has put someone on the naughty step and said: “There’s a few more of you out there and if you don’t reformulate your products yourself, we’re watching”’. But aside from political posturing, there is a darker side to the way that policies such as the sugar tax operate. They shift the blame for the impact of decisions made by those in power onto vulnerable individuals. For example, even as newspaper commentator Alex Renton acknowledged in the Observer that the sugar tax as a tokenistic gesture is likely to have little impact on rates of type 2 diabetes, he also said he’d support it because its messaging would nudge shoppers: ‘every mention of it is another warning to a parent buying a Britvic Drench for a thirsty toddler.’

The consumer-led approach blames declining public health on individual food choices, instead of on the choices by politicians that have constrained what and how people can feed themselves and their families. It provides shelter for this act of political forgetting, since once the ‘warning’ has been issued, its work is done – and the weight of failure falls firmly on those who are seen as failing to comply. The poorest serve as the abjected ‘Other’ against which the restraint and self-mastery of those proudly eating a ‘healthy’ diet can be measured.  

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When the sugar tax was introduced, it was with a triumphant fanfare, offering up a ‘big stick’ to beat industry where voluntarism had failed, and bringing with it endlessly optimistic promises of dietary and health transformations. There are many earnest and honourable voices in support of the sugar tax, but however well-intended, the tax begins with the wrong question, and so can never provide the answers that we need. Instead of asking, ‘How can we get people to eat less sugar?’, we should be asking, ‘How can we achieve social and food justice?’. This second question keeps our focus on political choices rather than food choices, and on inequalities as failures of social justice and not simply as barriers to be circumvented to get people to eat the ‘right’ things.

The infinite elasticity of what constitutes success for the sugar tax signals its socially damaging failure rather than its triumph. In this way, the sugar tax has become a lightning rod for ongoing debates about the distribution of responsibility for food and lifestyle choices, particularly in the wider context of austerity – and more recently, the cost-of-living crisis – where access to social support is increasingly tied to compliance with prescribed behaviours. Instead, we need to start by understanding why people make their food choices (if they have choices at all), and to take those choices seriously – not as displays of ignorance or greed that need to be corrected, but as choices that are meaningful: as acts of comfort, pleasure, convenience, necessity, or simple self-care.

^[1] Gault, A, ‘Tax the biscuit,’ The Sun, 18 March, 2016 (Print edition).

Read part 2 by Jonathan Nunn, Amelia Horgan, Ophira Gottlieb, Owen Hatherley and Rebecca May Johnson here

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Credits

Karen Throsby is Professor of Gender Studies and Head of the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds. She has been researching the intersections of gender, technology, bodies and health for over 20 years, including research on the new reproductive technologies, surgical weight management, extreme  endurance sport and most recently, the social life of sugar. She is the author of Sugar Rush: Science, Politics and the Demonisation of Fatness (Manchester University Press, 2023), Immersion: Marathon Swimming, Embodiment and Identity (Manchester University Press, 2016) and When IVF Fails: Feminism, Infertility and the Negotiation of Normality (Palgrave, 2004).

Sinjin Li is the moniker of Sing Yun Lee, an illustrator and graphic designer based in Essex. Sing uses the character of Sinjin Li to explore ideas found in science fiction, fantasy and folklore. They like to incorporate elements of this thinking in their commissioned work, creating illustrations and designs for subject matter including cultural heritage and belief, food and poetry among many other themes. They can be found at www.sinjinli.com and on Instagram at @sinjin_li

Vittles is edited by Sharanya Deepak, Rebecca May Johnson and Jonathan Nunn, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.

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