Ms Catherine Curran:

I thank the Deputy very much for his questions. I work for the Minister of State in the Department on the obesity policy, the action plan and its implementation. Speaking specifically to the evaluation which is being carried out on the sugar-sweetened drinks tax, we have a draft of the report already. It has not yet been released but hopefully it will be released in the next coming weeks. I can give the Deputy preliminary indications of what the findings are. The tax was introduced in 2018 with two policy objectives which were to reduce the consumption of sugar in carbonated drinks and to encourage reformulation of products. What we have seen, and what the figures are showing us, is that we have tax take figures and figures from Euromonitor International on the volumes of sugar being consumed but also on the levels of sugar compared to volumes being consumed.

We can see that there has been radical reformulation of the products of sugar-sweetened drinks over the past number of years. It was already beginning to happen and this is what industry argued with us, which is that it was already happening and in place from about 2008 to 2009 when we were already seeing reformulation of sugar-sweetened drinks. It has, however, accelerated since the introduction of the tax.

We can also see that four out of the five top brands do not pay the tax as they fall below the tax threshold. These are their normal and full sugar products as such. It is not their diet or zero-sugar product. They fall below 5 g per 100 mg tax threshold. That is encouraging to see.

The consumption of sugar has gone down and already we see, as the Minister of State said, that the tax take is reducing because the level of consumption of sugar is falling as more products fall out of the tax bracket or move from the higher tax bracket into the 5 g to 8 g of sugar per 100 mg threshold, which is the lower tax bracket. Above 8 g is the higher tax bracket. It is very encouraging to see this and we hope to have these results published in the coming weeks. We can circulate them and we will ensure the committee gets copies of the report when it is published.