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New health strategy undermined by stress on ‘individual responsibility’, experts say
Health experts have expressed disappointment in the government’s recent food strategy for England, calling the ‘individual responsibility’ rhetoric insufficient to address the obesity crisis. Ministers rejected a key proposal put forward by independent adviser Henry Dimbleby: a tax on salt and sugar aimed to encourage food manufacturers to reformulate their products.
Health secretary Sajid Javid last month urged people to take “personal responsibility” for their weight. Paul Gately, professor of exercise and obesity at Leeds Beckett University argued: “You have a political party driving a policy direction which is about individual responsibility and an evidence base that was actually going in the opposite direction,” citing environmental factors — including deprivation, availability of junk foods and transport methods — behind obesity’s rise.
“The best way to lose weight, believe me, is to eat less,” said prime minister Boris Johnson, insisting that a period of high inflation was not the moment to start “whacking new taxes on”.
A UK soft drinks levy introduced in 2018 to push manufacturers to reformulate their drinks with less sugar has been copied around the world. But subsequent, voluntary efforts at industry-wide reformulation have had little effect, said MacGregor, who founded campaign groups that survey supermarket products.
Food industry trade groups opposed the salt and sugar tax, as well as curbs on junk food advertising that have been postponed for at least a year. “Like the tobacco industry, they have fought it tooth and nail,” said MacGregor.
Speaking on the food strategy, Naveed Sattar, professor of cardiovascular and medical sciences at Glasgow university said: “A lot of people were disappointed on many levels. Fighting obesity and improving the food environment is a long-term goal. Unless you have very hard-hitting legislation, it’s not going to change.”
Source: Financial Times, 17 June 2022
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Lynton Crosby, the election guru and businessman, has been attending Boris Johnson’s 8.30am meetings in No 10, showing he is more involved in the prime minister’s decision making than previously thought.
The Australian political strategist, whose advisory firm CT Group has represented tobacco as well as oil and gas interests, is known to have been helping Johnson remotely over his leadership woes but his involvement in the regular meetings shows he appears to have taken a much greater role than before. His return to advising Johnson has coincided with a shift to the right as the prime minister tries to bolster his standing with that wing of the party and those who elected him 2019.
A No 10 source confirmed that Crosby had attended some morning meetings, but insisted these were party political rather than official government ones. A second source said he also sometimes attended in-person, entering No 10 via a more discreet entrance in the Cabinet Office. They claimed that officials had raised concerns about his attendance.
A government spokesperson said: “Lynton Crosby is not a government employee. Any assistance to the prime minister would be party political and in his capacity as leader of the Conservative party.”
Labour’s Fleur Anderson, the shadow paymaster general, said the revelations were “deeply alarming and raise questions about whether Crosby has inappropriate access to high-level government decision making [...] Given his business interests in sectors such as oil and gas, the potential conflicts of interest are seriously concerning, especially if they have not been declared [...] This stinks of yet more Tory cronyism at the highest levels.”
A CT Group spokesperson said it was “engaged to provide strategic advice to the Conservative party and its leader” and that Crosby, as its chief executive, “provides that advice from time to time”. They added that “the company complies fully with requirements under the Lobbying Act regarding the disclosure of clients.”
Source: The Guardian, 17 June 2022
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The former owner of a convenience store appearing at Bradford Crown Court on Thursday, has been jailed for six months for selling counterfeit cigarettes from the business over an 18-month period.
Warnings from police and Trading Standards officers were given such little regard by Aziz Abdullah that he was seen refilling his shelves with contraband tobacco while police were still filling out paperwork from their last raid.
The charges, which he pleaded guilty to at Bradford and Keighley Magistrates Court in April, relate to a period between October 2019 and March 2021. In that period the store was raided by police three times and Abdullah was warned that the goods he was selling were illegal. When police raided the store a fourth time and found he was still selling counterfeit cigarettes, he was arrested.
Angus MacDonald, prosecuting, said in total 27,000 counterfeit cigarettes were seized, as well as a large amount of tobacco. The total tax avoided on these goods had cost the Treasury over £9,000.
Source: Telegraph & Argus, 17 June 2022
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Dame Lesley Regan has been appointed as England’s first women’s health ambassador which will aim to close “the gender health gap”.
Dame Lesley, a practising doctor has 42 years’ experience working in women’s health and wants to make it easier for women and girls to access reproductive care in the community such as contraception.
She will also support the Government on the upcoming women’s health strategy.
The aims of the women's health strategy include ensuring:
• All women feel comfortable talking about their health and no longer face taboos
• All women feel supported in the workplace and can reach their full potential at work
• Better representation in research trials
Source: BBC News, 17 June 2022
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Research published this week in Tobacco Control shows high prevalence of tobacco retailers near schools in 10 cities across China. In contrast, compliance with posting ‘no sales to minors’ signs is low.
Tobacco sales were observed by trained data collectors near junior, senior and vocational high schools in rural and urban areas in 10 cities across China, including Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Chongqing, Shenyang, Jinan, Kunming, Guilin, Kaifeng and Baiyin.
Over half of urban schools (57%) and a large majority of rural schools (71%) had a cigarette retailer within a 100m and a 250m radius, respectively. Nearly all cigarette and e-cigarette retailers displayed tobacco products inside, and approximately half of these retailers did not display required signage prohibiting sales to minors.
The authors concluded that effective enforcement of prohibiting tobacco retailers around schools and stronger restrictions on tobacco displays are needed to protect youth in China.
Source: Global Tobacco Control, 17 June 2022
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Writing for the King’s Fund, David Buck, Senior Fellow in Public Health & Inequalities at the King's Fund and former deputy director for health inequalities at the Department of Health, welcomes the recent Khan review on smoking, but outlines two underwhelming themes that could jeopardise its title and aim, Making Smoking Obsolete.
Buck questions whether £125 million asking for additional resources a year is sufficient to truly achieve this: “With around 6 million smokers in England that works out at an ask of £21 per smoker, less than the cost of 2 packs of 20 cigarettes each. Is that really enough for the scale of the challenge?”
He explains that “the majority of this funding, £70 million, is for ring-fenced smoking cessation services, which if delivered through local government would double the current spending on smoking cessation in local government and take it to £140 million. This would be £10 million more in cash terms than where it was in 2013/14, since when it has fallen dramatically as a result of central government cuts to the public health budget. The rest is spread very thinly from tackling £15 million for tackling illicit tobacco (against the £1.9 billion in UK taxes lost to illegal trade) to £2 million for new research.”
Buck continues that going forward, approaches must be more fine tuned for different population group’s specific needs and circumstances so that we can really target inequality reduction, writing that “while population-level tobacco policies can be effective in narrowing some health inequalities, there needs to be a step-change in both the resources available locally, and more granularity in national policy and local practice.”
“The Khan review comes at an important time for wider government health goals as well as smoking cessation efforts directly,” Buck concludes “so the review is not a magic bullet, but if it is implemented in full through the forthcoming disparities White Paper it will make a real and lasting difference.”
Source: The King’s Fund, 16 June 2022
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