“Some takeaway meals contain more calories in one sitting than someone is advised to consume in an entire day, a study of British eating habits has revealed.” So declared the Guardian at the weekend, off the back of some research from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta). In fact, Nesta was only able to find one “meal” that met that criteria and that was a pizza and chips. A quick scan of the Dominoes website confirms that there are indeed a lot of calories in a big, cheese-coated pizza so it seems wise to warn weight-conscious individuals not to eat a whole one and, if they do, not to accompany it with 500 calories of fries.

Friendly, if obvious, advice was not on Nesta’s agenda, however. Lauren Bowes Byatt, Nesta’s deputy director for a healthy life said the findings “should ring alarm bells for policymakers” and that “eating out no longer feels like a rare treat, & is an area where govt intervention is lacking”. Including meal deals in the government’s forthcoming ban on volume price discounts is one recommendation. According to Lauren Bowes Byatt, the whole category of supermarket meal deals is “low hanging fruit” for regulators.

What is Nesta and how did it end up with a deputy director for a healthy life calling for the state to regulate sandwiches? It was created by the Blair government in 1998 with an endowment of £250 million from the national lottery. It was supposed to be an engine of innovation. It was supposed to unlock potential and deliver economic growth. Instead, it became a cautionary tale about the nature of quangos.

The plan was for Nesta to “find and champion talented artists, inventors and scientists early in their careers and help turn their dreams into reality”. The culture secretary, Chris Smith, said Nesta “will help talented people to develop their full potential, create successful businesses and jobs, and improve public awareness of and interest in science, technology and the arts.” But as early as 1999, the veteran publisher John Calder was warning that it would be “another damp squib which will probably end up benefiting more bureaucrats than artists or scientists.” 

It was a prescient remark. Skip forward 25 years and Nesta has become just another money-guzzling mouthpiece of conventional wisdom. In addition to its inevitable commitment to “equity, diversity and inclusion”, it has three core “missions”: “A Fairer Start”, “A Healthy Life” and “A Sustainable Future’” This agenda is so bland that it is almost impossible to argue with. The problem with Nesta is not that its aims are inherently bad but that its policies are stupefyingly predictable. 

Nesta’s sustainability workstream is mostly about getting people to buy heat pumps, a technology that has been promoted and subsidised by successive Conservative prime ministers to no great end and which the future energy secretary, Ed Miliband, is obsessed with. Nesta recently published a report titled “How to make heat pumps more affordable”. You’ll never guess what their solution was. More subsidies! I guess this is why these guys get paid the big bucks.

The main — and almost sole — objective of Nesta’s healthy living module is to halve obesity prevalence by 2030. This is a slight modification of Theresa May’s target of halving childhood obesity by 2030 and is equally unachievable. How do they plan to do it? By extending the sugar tax to various foods, forcing food manufacturers to reformulate their products and banning “junk food” advertising. The likes of the Obesity Health Alliance have been saying this for years. The advertising ban is already in the Health and Care Act and a reformulation scheme, albeit without the fines that Nesta would like to see, has been running since 2016. Public Health England, Henry Dimbleby, Jamie Oliver, Chris van Tulleken and numerous other dietary armchair generals got there first, so what is to be gained from Nesta parroting the same lines?  

Nesta’s report at the weekend, which found that the out-of-home food sector contributes around 300 calories per day to the average person’s diet, was virtually a carbon copy of work done by Public Health England years ago and their conclusion was the same, i.e. the government should regulate fast food shops more. As usual, Nesta is proposing nothing that Action on Sugar hasn’t been demanding for a decade. And say what you like about Action on Sugar, but at least they’re cheap. Last year they got by on £96,431 and could fit their entire workforce into a small, family car. Nesta spent £60 million and employed 510 people, thirty of whom earn more than £100,000 and two of whom earn more than £210,000.

This is an organisation whose core purpose is supposed to be innovation and yet it failed to see a new generation of weight-loss drugs coming and when it finally acknowledged the arrival of semaglutide, it expressed concerns that it could “deepen the emphasis in the popular discourse on a “personal responsibility” narrative”. As Andrew Orlowski has recounted, Nesta got the opportunity to develop a touchscreen smartphone before Apple did, but cocked it up at every turn. In their early years, they funded “a man who is building a radio-controlled Harrier jump jet, a team preparing to travel to the Arctic to film the Northern Lights in 3D and an internet project offering psychological advice online.” These days they dish out grants to the likes of Tortoise Media and Open Democracy.

Everything the state touches dissolves into the same squelchy, grey, self-serving, leftish puddle of inanity. Whatever your view of heat pumps and food taxes, they are not the products of blue sky thinking. A quarter of a century after being set up as a Dragons Den for Britain’s most brilliant minds, Nesta has become essentially a May-ite think tank. The only people benefiting from its existence are its employees. As the genuinely original thinker Sam Bowman says, it would be better to close it down, strip its assets and give a few quid back to everyone who bought a lottery ticket in 1998.