Mr. Chris Macey:

Regarding the Deputy's comments about sugar and education, what we found and what the research says is that it is the ubiquity, marketing and the relative cheapness of unhealthy food that have caused the explosion in the national waistline. We do not yet have an evaluation of our sugar-sweetened drink tax. It is still being done five or nearly six years on. An almost identical tax was introduced in the UK and it was shown within a year that it had had a significant impact and taken something like 35% of the sugar content of those beverages out of the system generally because it incentivised producers to reduce the amount of sugar in their drinks and, therefore, taste-changed people starting drinking those. Because they reduced the sugar, they did not lose any business. Sales went up by 10% but the sugar went out of it. Those sort of approaches are the type of approaches governments need to look at. Regarding reformulating over time, salt is a great example. In the UK, they were doing this up to 2010 and then a new government came in and stopped it. They were gradually reducing the amount of sugar in products and it was having a really big impact in reducing cardio-vascular disease and cardio-vascular deaths. These are things we have to look at. We can help people enormously by doing that. If people say that protecting your citizens is a nanny state, that is up to them but it is something governments and policy makers have to start taking on.