NHS England Proposes Sugar Tax on Hospital Vending Machines

19 Jan 2016 --- NHS England chief executive Simon Stevens is proposing a concerted national effort to remove from supply or reduce consumption of unhealthy food across NHS facilities including hospitals and health centres.

He believes the public sector needs to get its own house in order and the NHS needs to start practising what it preaches. These proposals will be synched up with the Government's forthcoming national childhood obesity strategy.

Key building blocks for the NHS to include are:

• New tougher food and nutrition standards for food served to patients on hospital wards, and cooked for staff in canteens.

• For food and drinks sold in hospital retail outlets and vending machines, will consult shortly on trusts imposing a fee ('tax') to be paid by the vendor for each sugar sweetened beverage sold, or an equivalent mechanism.

• Hospitals to retain all proceed from the 'NHS sugar tax' - could initially be worth £20-40m with matching incentive funding from 'CQUIN' fund - but they will be required to reinvest it in staff health and wellbeing programmes, building on the successful approaches being implemented in the first 12 NHS bodies now leading this work.

• Rolling programme of contract renegotiation as contracts / franchises come up for renewal to ban unhealthiest junk food from vending machine (NHS doesn’t sell cigarettes on its property, and has gone smoke free) and require offer of healthier affordable tasty alternatives.

A spokesperson for NHS England said; “The consultation is likely to propose several alternative approaches, one of which would be levying a fixed 'tax' or sales fee on the vendor - rather than direct to the consumer - for any sugar sweetened beverage sold. The fee for each sugar sweetened beverage would typically be the equivalent of at least a 20 per cent tax on sugary drinks at their current average retail prices.”