Why won’t Chris Whitty go away? If he had any decency, the Chief Medical Officer would have resigned in 2021 after he told fibs about Omicron in an attempt to bounce Boris Johnson into yet another lockdown. (In case you’ve forgotten, he said that “all the things we do know are bad” about the manifestly less dangerous Covid variant.) Every other player in the nightmare of 2020-21 has shuffled off the stage, but Whitty lingers on, a slap-headed Rasputin whispering terrible ideas into the ears of our leaders.

After receiving a knighthood for services to cratering the economy, Professor Sir Chris talked Rishi Sunak into banning adults born after a certain year from buying tobacco, an idea so preposterous that even New Zealand abandoned it, and tried to get Keir Starmer to ban smoking in outdoor smoking areas. In the aftermath of a cost of living crisis that he is in no small measure responsible for, Whitty has now decided that food is too cheap. The Chief Medical Officer’s annual report, published yesterday, proposes “an industry-wide levy on salt and sugar” with a view to reducing rates of obesity. This, supposedly, will build on the success of the Soft Drinks Industry Levy which Whitty describes as a “landmark public health intervention”. 

Readers are invited to judge the success of the sugar tax from the graph below. The huge spike in 2020 coincided with the schools being closed on the advice of the Chief Medical Officer, but rates of childhood obesity were already ticking up in 2018 and 2019 following the introduction of the sugar tax.

Although it is considered rather gauche in public health circles to judge policies by their results, the obvious failure of the sugar tax to reduce rates of obesity amongst children (and adults) should count against it, especially since it has cost consumers hundreds of millions of pounds a year. Extending the tax to sugar and salt in food would impose an even greater financial burden on consumers, most of whom, unlike Whitty, are not paid £205,000 a year to come up with ridiculous ideas.

Members of the reality-based community may point out that salt is the only ingredient in food that contains no calories and is therefore an unlikely scapegoat for obesity. They might also observe that taxes on sugary and salty food have been tried elsewhere in the world to no great effect. Hungary introduced a “public health product tax” in 2011 which raised the price of a broad range of food and soft drinks that were deemed high in fat, sugar and salt. An evaluation published earlier this year found that it had no longterm effect on what people eat but has instead “contributed to increased inequality as low-income households spend a higher proportion of their total expenditure on it”. A similar tax on fatty food was introduced in Denmark in 2011 but was such a political and economic fiasco that it was repealed fifteen months later.

Introducing a regressive tax that has failed in other countries in an attempt to build on the non-existent success of a tax that has failed in this country is the very opposite of evidence-based policy-making. If this is the best idea Chris Whitty can come up with, it really is time for him to ride off into the sunset.