Why locking industry out of food policy will fail, again

Exclude industry from the room, and the room does not get any more honest. It just gets less informed.

That is the practical problem sitting inside a demand now being made with growing confidence across UK public health: that the food industry should have no part in shaping the policy that regulates it.

Dolly van Tulleken put the case explicitly to The Grocer last week: the ultra-processed food industry, she argued, should not be involved in conceiving or setting the ambition level of policies designed to regulate it. Not disclosing interests. Not sitting at the table under supervision. Excluded, full stop, from the room where the ambition is set.

This is not a one-off. Earlier this year, following Chris van Tulleken's own testimony to the Health and Social Care Committee, Professor Anna Gilmore of the University of Bath called for the food industry to be shut out of the policy room entirely.

Two senior figures in UK public health, in the space of a few months, arriving at the same demand: industry has no legitimate place in setting the direction of the policy that governs it. This is not a fringe position, it is not going away, and it deserves to be taken on directly rather than nodded through.

Why "conflicted, therefore excluded" doesn't survive consistency

If having a financial stake in the outcome disqualifies you from the room, the exclusion cannot stop at food manufacturers. The NHS has a direct financial interest in obesity policy, since every case prevented is a cost avoided.

Public health charities depend, for their funding and their relevance, on the problems they campaign against remaining live political issues. Academic researchers build careers, grants and publications on the same questions they are being asked to adjudicate.

None of that makes any of these voices illegitimate. It makes the "conflicted, therefore excluded" test unworkable the moment it is applied consistently rather than selectively.

Public health campaigners treat the presence of an interest as equivalent to the corruption of a process. Yet every party in a contested policy debate has an interest.

The question that actually matters is not who has one, but whether the process for weighing competing interests is visible and honest. Excluding one category of interested party while leaving the others in the room does not produce a conflict-free process. It produces a process with one fewer source of technical knowledge and exactly the same amount of interest in the outcome.

The evidence: engagement works, exclusion doesn't

The UK's most successful public health reformulation effort, the voluntary salt reduction programme that began in 2003, worked precisely because manufacturers were in the room alongside the Food Standards Agency and SACN, explaining what was achievable in bread, cereal and processed meat without destroying the product or the business making it. Average salt intake fell from 9.5g to around 8g a day within a decade. The Food and Drink Federation's own members went on to cut salt by 31 per cent, sugar by 30 per cent and calories by 24 per cent across their ranges, according to figures reported by New Food Magazine. None of that came from a policy built without the people who understood shelf life, food safety and manufacturing constraints well enough to make it stick.

Compare that with the record where exclusion has actually been tried. Alcohol policy has made far less progress globally over the past decade than either salt or sugar reduction, which were built on engagement rather than exile. Excluding a stakeholder with genuinely useful technical knowledge does not remove its interest in the outcome. It removes its expertise from the process while leaving every incentive to shape that outcome through channels nobody is watching.

This is the part the exclusion argument consistently fails to reckon with: a policy that cannot be implemented is not a stronger policy for having kept its hands clean. It is a weaker one. Cutting sugar in a breakfast cereal without understanding how sugar affects texture and shelf life produces a product that fails in the market and gets quietly withdrawn, not a public health win. A committee that hands down an ambition with no route to delivery has produced a press release, not a policy.

None of this is an argument that industry should write the rules it will be judged by, and nobody serious is proposing that either. It is an argument that the "conceiving or setting the ambition" test Van Tulleken proposes draws the line in the wrong place. The line that actually matters is not who is in the room. It is whether the process for weighing what they say, and whose interests they represent while saying it, is visible enough for the public to judge for itself.

Removing industry from the room does not create transparency. It just moves the argument about who has standing from where the evidence is being weighed to a much simpler, much less useful argument about who gets a seat.

The people who pay for that mistake will not be the campaigners or the professors. It will be whichever family is still buying a product that never got safely reformulated, because the manufacturer who knew how was never invited to help.