Ms Cliona Loughnane:

In terms of the size of the sugar sweetened drinks, the Deputy is right. What we think of as small now would not be what my grandfather would have thought of as small in the past. In New York there is what is called "the big gulp"; we do not have that here yet. These are 32 oz drinks. There has been a big push there to change the size of those. The industry has completely opposed it and it has now gone to the courts, and I am not sure what will happen there. We would like the tax to be introduced to directly address this in terms of the volume sold. We would like the tax to be on volume metric basis, which would be on the volume of the product. In that way the tax would increase if one were to buy a 1 litre drink or a multi-pack of drinks. The best way to introduce the tax would be on a per volume basis. That is the way it has been done in France. It has put a 7 cent tax on a litre drink. We do not believe that amount would increase the price enough but it is a move in the right direction.

On the diet drinks, we would like the sugar sweetened drinks tax to be on the added sugars, that is, the full fat or the full sugar drinks. There is talk of the difference in the VAT rates. This is something we pointed out in our pre-budget submission last year, the different VAT rating for different food products. It seems to be completely arbitrary.