Ms Kate O'Flaherty:

I will respond to Deputy Mitchell's questions in reverse order. She asked about ring-fencing the tax take from a sugar tax and other measures. The current Government policy and that of the Department of Finance is not to hypothecate the tax take for particular reasons. A point regarding such a tax is that if it is as successful as we hope, it will be a diminishing tax over time. However, as I mentioned in the opening statement, since 2017, the Government has initiated a Healthy Ireland Fund, specifically for us to drive some of that cross-sectoral partnership work. At this time of the year when discussions on the Estimates are under way, we in the Department make a very strong case for increasing that Healthy Ireland Fund to support that work.

On the point regarding the question on reformulation, work on the reformulation has been prioritised under the obesity policy. There is an interest in the industry in doing that and we have had engagement with people. We set up the reformulation subgroup as a priority which will set out a roadmap specifically around sugar and fat content. We work quite closely with industry and keep a watch on what is happening UK because England has strategies and targets particularly around sugar and fat reduction and related reductions in portion size. Many of the products that come into the Irish market are in the UK market. Our committee has done good work. It has the bones of a draft roadmap on the way forward. We had quite a large workshop with industry, which was well attended, in terms of setting, and getting consensus on, the targets which we can support and keep the process moving. At an industry level there are complications in terms of moving their products. In anticipation of measures being introduced, and the sugar tax is a good example of this, the industry often will start to make moves in that direction and some of that is influenced by consumer attitudes.

Regarding voluntary codes of practice, we have a number of stakeholders who are interested in getting that up and running. They were launched in February. Our commitment was to have this progressed this year. We are making progress on that. We have had good and positive engagement from the industry on that, from food manufacturers, retailers and advertisers. There are some complex issues around how we would monitor certain aspects of the codes. There is an element in the codes where retailers have signed up to make bigger efforts around promoting healthy food and making healthier food, for example, fruit and vegetables cheaper and, therefore more accessible to people. There are issues around how we procure the monitoring of that. There is the aspect of moving forward with implementation. We are engaging with the industry in terms of setting up a register of all companies so that we would know everyone who has signed up to this.

Some of the challenges are around monitoring. For example, there is no obvious statutory body that monitors media, especially non-broadcast media. That is one challenge we are working through. It is a question of how to set up to get all the parts moving. We intend to have significant progress made before the end of the year on that.