Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps he is taking to reduce the levels of sugar in children's drinks.

Through our voluntary partnership with industry, we have seen many supermarkets and soft drinks manufacturers take a range of actions to help consumers eat and drink fewer calories. This includes actions to reduce sugar in the drinks they produce and retail and to develop more no or low sugar options.

Examples of recent activity through the voluntary partnership to reduce the intake of sugar from soft drinks include: Britvic’s decision to take its full sugar Fruit Shoot off the market, which it is estimated will remove 2.2 billion kcals from children’s drinks; and the Co-operative Group’s decision to take-out the added sugar from its high juices, which will remove 1.5 billion kcals per year.

The school food standards severely restrict the availability of drinks high in sugar. The regulations allow only healthy drinks to be provided in local authority maintained schools, academies set up prior to 2010 and academies and free schools signing their funding agreements from spring 2014.

The Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition has recently published its draft recommendations on carbohydrates. The final report, together with advice from Public Health England on sugar in the diet, is expected to be published in late spring 2015. This will inform the Government’s future thinking on sugar.