Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps the Government is taking to ensure that food manufacturers reduce sugar content in their products.

As part of our Childhood Obesity Plan we have seen some good progress on sugar reduction.

Public Health England’s (PHE) sugar reduction programme challenges industry to reduce sugar by 20% by 2020 in foods that our children consume the most. PHE’s recent report, ‘Sugar reduction and wider reformulation programme: Report on progress towards the first 5% reduction and next steps’, shows some good progress. For example, yoghurts have exceeded the first year target and achieved a 6% reduction in sugar.

The soft drinks industry levy has seen half of the products that were initially in scope reformulated – that’s equivalent of removing 45 million kilograms of sugar every year.

We are confident industry will continue to reformulate their products and further progress will be made.