Britain's sugar tax cut sugar in soft drinks by 47 per cent. The same companies managed 3.5 per cent in foods without one
The Soft Drinks Industry Levy is one of the cleanest policy successes of the past decade. Ministers have decided it should stay locked to drinks.
Between 2015 and 2024, the sugar in pre-packaged soft drinks falling within the scope of the UK's Soft Drinks Industry Levy fell by 47 per cent. Over a roughly comparable window, the sugar in foods covered by Public Health England's voluntary reduction programme fell by 3.5 per cent. The companies are largely the same. The supply chains are the same. The R&D departments are the same. One programme had a tiered tax sitting behind it. The other had a request.
That is the entire argument for what the Recipe for Change coalition is asking the government to do, and it is also why the government has decided not to do it.
What 47 per cent buys you
The Soft Drinks Industry Levy was announced by George Osborne in March 2016 and implemented in April 2018. Its design was unusual. Rather than a sales tax paid by consumers, it was a tiered tax paid by manufacturers and importers: 18 pence per litre on drinks containing 5 to 8 grams of sugar per 100ml, 24 pence on those above 8 grams, nothing on drinks below the lower threshold. Reformulating downward beat paying the tax. Almost everybody reformulated.
The peer-reviewed evidence on what happened next is unusually strong, partly because the policy was designed from the outset to be evaluated. A team led by Peter Scarborough at Oxford and Cambridge published the most thorough analysis in PLOS Medicine in March 2024. Sugar from purchased drinks fell by 15 grams per household per week. Modelled forward over ten years, the policy is projected to prevent 64,100 cases of overweight and obesity in children and adolescents and 3,600 dental cavities. Most striking, the gains concentrate where the burden is heaviest: 11,000 quality-adjusted life years in the most deprived fifth of the country, against 1,860 in the least deprived. Earlier surveillance work by Nina Rogers and colleagues found a 2.4 percentage point absolute reduction in obesity among Year 6 girls in the most deprived areas, with no equivalent finding among children in wealthier postcodes.
Here is the part that the policy's original critics did not predict. The Food and Drink Federation, in 2016, told ministers the levy was "not evidence-based and will not be in the least bit effective." It was wrong. Sales did not collapse. Manufacturers reformulated. The Treasury collected revenue. Hospital admissions for dental caries-related tooth extractions in children fell by around 12 per cent. A Frontier Economics analysis estimated cumulative health-related macroeconomic gains of £2.49 billion against a small net GDP cost of £2.01 billion, with the health gains alone offsetting the tax-efficiency loss.
So we have a tested mechanism. We know it changes what manufacturers make. We know consumers do not particularly notice. We know the public health benefits are real and disproportionately help the poorest children. The obvious question is what happens when you apply the same mechanism to the rest of the food we buy.
The promise that wasn't kept
In July 2021, Henry Dimbleby published part two of the National Food Strategy, the first comprehensive review of the UK food system in seventy-five years. He had been commissioned by Michael Gove in 2019 and given remarkable access. The headline recommendation was a £3-per-kilogram tax on sugar and £6-per-kilogram tax on salt sold to food manufacturers, restaurants and caterers, structured along the lines of the SDIL.
Boris Johnson rejected it within a fortnight, citing concerns about adding to household costs. The 2022 Government Food Strategy that emerged adopted only a fraction of Dimbleby's recommendations. Kath Dalmeny, chief executive of Sustain, called it "a feeble to do list, that may or may not get ticked." The 9pm watershed for junk food advertising, which Dimbleby had also recommended, was delayed twice and only came into force in January 2026. Restrictions on multibuy junk food promotions were pushed back from October 2022 to October 2023. The salt and sugar tax disappeared from official discussion entirely.
Dimbleby resigned in March 2023, telling The Sunday Times that ministers had succumbed to an "ultra-free-market ideology" and were spooked by the "nanny state" charge in red-wall constituencies. He has not gone quiet since. He published Ravenous later that year and set up Bramble Partners in early 2026, a consultancy and investment firm that aims to do from outside government what he failed to do from inside it. Speaking to The Grocer, he described the situation as "an unexploded bomb sitting underneath our society," referring to the trajectory of diet-related disease costs. On current trends, by 2035 the NHS will spend more on treating type 2 diabetes than it currently spends on treating all cancers combined.
The November 2025 Treasury consultation on strengthening the SDIL clarified what the current government is willing to do and what it is not. The levy will be extended to milk-based and milk-substitute drinks from January 2028, and the lower threshold will tighten. But the consultation document was explicit that the government was "not seeking to revisit SDIL's fundamental design and scope" and would not consider extending the model to other food categories. The mechanism stays in its original box.
The script the food industry inherited
What has happened to the Recipe for Change campaign since its 2023 launch follows a pattern that public health researchers have been documenting for thirty years, in language that ought to give British ministers pause. The pattern is the tobacco industry playbook, and it has not been adapted for food regulation by accident.
In a March 2026 paper, Christina Roberto of the Penn Center for Food and Nutrition Policy laid out the institutional history. For decades, several of the largest US tobacco companies owned the largest food manufacturers. Philip Morris bought Kraft in 1988. RJR Nabisco existed as a single firm from 1985 to 1999. The legal teams, the lobbying firms, the public-relations playbooks and the relationships with friendly think tanks moved between products. "Voluntary industry rule programs," in Roberto's phrasing, "deceptive media campaigns," and the strategic invocation of personal responsibility were not novel responses to food regulation. They were the existing machinery turned to a new use.
The original tobacco playbook is no longer secret. The University of California San Francisco maintains a public archive of more than 24 million previously confidential documents made available through litigation, including the 1969 R.J. Reynolds memorandum that gave the strategy its most quoted phrase: "Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the body of fact that exists in the mind of the general public." Kelly Brownell and Kenneth Warner, in a 2009 paper in The Milbank Quarterly, mapped specific food-industry tactics onto the tobacco precedent: dismissing peer-reviewed studies as junk science, funding favourable research, introducing "healthier" product lines as a defence against regulation, lobbying against restrictions on marketing to children, and pre-empting strong legislation by promoting weaker voluntary alternatives.
This last move is the one that matters most for the British case. The Public Health England sugar reduction programme, launched in 2017, set a voluntary target of 20 per cent reduction across non-drink categories by 2020. It achieved 3.5 per cent. Voluntary salt-reduction targets after 2014, when responsibility for them moved away from the Food Standards Agency, also stalled. The British Heart Foundation calculates that the average Briton now consumes weekly the salt equivalent of 155 packets of crisps, most of it added before the food reaches the trolley.
The same companies, working on the same factory lines, achieved the 47 per cent reduction in soft drinks. The variable was not capacity. The variable was the price of inaction.
What the cumulative burden argument actually says
The strongest version of the food industry's case does not come from the FDF's standard press releases. It comes from sympathetic outside analysts. James Watson, a UK partner at the operations consultancy Argon & Co, articulated it cleanly in November 2025 in response to the SDIL extension. The problem, Watson argued, is not the levy itself but the absence of a coherent long-term strategy. "Manufacturers aren't necessarily reacting to the pennies at stake, they're exhausted from handling a steady stream of fragmented interventions. At this point, it's the cumulative burden that threatens investment, not this single policy – a thousand cuts wearing businesses down."
There is something to this. UK food policy over the past decade has been a sequence of one-off measures with shifting timelines, missing white papers, abandoned strategies and inconsistent enforcement. Manufacturers planning capital investment in reformulation reasonably want to know what the regulatory landscape will look like in five and ten years. The SDIL succeeded partly because it was clear, predictable and tiered to a measurable target. A patchwork of policies announced and delayed and announced again does not have those properties.
The Watson argument is a serious case for clarity and timetabling. It is not a case for inaction. It is, in fact, an argument for the kind of coherent legislative framework that the Recipe for Change coalition is asking for: a published roadmap, a tiered structure modelled on the SDIL, multi-year lead times, and revenue ringfenced for child-health programmes. Industry asks for predictability. The campaign offers predictability. What industry trade bodies actually oppose, when one reads the FDF's 2021 response to the National Food Strategy, is not unpredictability but mandatory targets at all. "These taxes will not drive reformulation" was the headline claim. The SDIL drove a 47 per cent reformulation. The claim is empirically dead.
The Cambridge modelling published in PLOS Medicine in 2024 also closes off the most politically powerful objection, which is that any new levy must hurt the poorest. It does not. The largest health gains, in absolute terms, accrue to children in the most deprived parts of the country, and they accrue because reformulation changes what is on the shelf, not because consumers are priced out of the products they buy.
Why 'nanny state' won the argument
If the evidence is this clear and the public is this favourable - 73 per cent supported regulating sugar and saturated fat levels in food in YouGov polling for Recipe for Change in 2026, 70 per cent the same for salt - the political failure needs its own explanation. The honest one is uncomfortable for both sides.
The SDIL succeeded politically in 2016 because it was framed as a tax on companies, not on consumers. Osborne's announcement positioned soft drinks manufacturers as the relevant agents and emphasised that compliant firms would pay nothing. The framing held. By 2018 the policy was a quiet success that very few people noticed paying for, because the tax was paid by importers and producers and absorbed largely through reformulation rather than passed through to shelf prices. The 31 per cent pass-through rate to consumer prices in the high-tax tier, documented by Scarborough and colleagues in 2020, made it materially less painful than its critics had predicted.
What changed between 2018 and now is not the evidence but the available framing. The cost-of-living crisis made any new fiscal measure on food easy to characterise, however inaccurately, as a tax on family budgets. Dimbleby's account of red-wall sensitivity to "nanny state" interventions was not the cause of the political failure but a symptom of it. By the time the National Food Strategy reached Downing Street in 2021, the political space for a tax on industry had narrowed because the term "tax" itself had become toxic in any context proximate to household spending. The campaign's task in 2026 is not winning on evidence, which it already has. It is winning on framing, which the food industry largely controls because it sets the price of the products and gets to decide whether to pass costs through or absorb them.
This is where I find myself genuinely angry about the British political response, in a way that the consultancy register makes hard to express. We have a working policy. We have its peer-reviewed evaluation. We have a coalition of forty-six health organisations including the British Heart Foundation, the British Medical Association, Diabetes UK and the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health asking for the obvious extension. We have public majorities of 70 per cent or more in favour. We have the former government food tsar, who built the original case, telling anyone who will listen that ministers are ignoring an unexploded bomb. And the Treasury's response in November 2025 was a sentence stating that the existing levy's "fundamental design and scope" would not be revisited.
That is not a policy decision. That is a refusal to make a policy decision, dressed in the language of one.
What this is actually about
The deepest charge in Dimbleby's account is not that this government is unusually craven or unusually captured. It is that the structural incentives of the food industry are such that without external pressure there is no internal mechanism that pulls reformulation backwards. Companies invest in calorie-dense food because we eat it, and we eat it because they invest in it. The SDIL broke that loop in one product category by changing the maths inside the boardroom. Nothing similar has been allowed to happen anywhere else.
The Recipe for Change coalition's modelling, conducted by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, suggests an extended industry levy on salt and sugar across food and food service could prevent up to two million cases of chronic disease over twenty-five years and deliver economic benefits valued at £77.9 billion. The Frontier Economics estimate of obesity's current annual cost to the UK economy, commissioned by Nesta, stands at £126 billion. We are paying for the cheap food, very expensively, just not at the till.
What the campaign is asking for is, by international standards, modest. Mexico has had a salt and sugar tax framework since 2014. Chile has front-of-pack warning labels and marketing restrictions that are routinely cited as the global gold standard. Hungary has a public health product tax that has raised over a billion euros and shifted purchasing patterns. None of these countries has experienced the dietary collapse that the FDF predicts of any British equivalent. What several of them have experienced is sustained legal and political resistance from food and tobacco industries using strategies that the UCSF archive lets us trace, document by document, across forty years.
If the Citizens' Charter does reach a hearing in Westminster this autumn, the question worth asking is not whether the evidence supports extension. It plainly does. The question is whether ministers can be persuaded that doing nothing is itself a policy choice, with measurable, calculable, and disproportionately deprived victims. The Soft Drinks Industry Levy works. The decision to keep it locked to soft drinks is not a failure of evidence. It is a failure of nerve.