Getting UK slimmer will boost productivity, says ex-food tsar

TACKLING obesity is the key to solving Britain’s stagnant productivity rates, former government food tsar Henry Dimbleby has said.

Mr Dimbleby, co-founder of the Leon fast food chain and a former adviser to the Government, argued that increasing the fitness of the nation could help remedy high rates of economic inactivity in the UK and improve productivity.

He said: “We’ve got a situation where 2.8million people are out of work for four major conditions: muscular skeletal problems, Type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease and mental health, three of which are directly caused by food.

“You’ve got the Treasury looking at this and saying, ‘My God, diet is costing us a lot of money’. If you don’t do anything, what happens is the NHS sucks in the money from the rest of society, because we can’t let that go down.”

He added: “We have lower productivity, lower tax receipts and we become both sick and impoverished as a nation.”

Workers in Britain are less productive than their counterparts in the US, France and Germany, according to the Office for National Statistics.

Its latest figures show that for every hour of labour, a typical French worker produces almost 20pc more than their

British equivalent. The gap rises to just over one-quarter when comparing British workers with Americans.

Mr Dimbleby called for a crackdown on junk food.

More than 25pc of adults in the UK are considered obese, according to Government data from 2021, while a further 37.9pc are overweight. Mr Dimbleby said: “The fundamental

‘If you don’t do anything the NHS sucks in money from the rest of society as we can’t let that go down’

[question] is – are people fit and ready to work? Food is a huge part of that.”

Mr Dimbleby, the son of the veteran broadcaster David Dimbleby, was hired by Michael Gove in 2019 to lead a major review of the UK food system when Mr Gove was the environment secretary.

The result was a series of policy recommendations called the National Food Strategy. These included calls to introduce a tax on sugar and salt and use the revenues to provide fruit and vegetables to low-income families; make it mandatory for large food companies with more than 250 employees to report annual data on their sales of junk food; and extend the availability of free school meals.

However, Mr Dimbleby resigned from Government work last year, criticising what he called “insane” inaction from ministers and an “ultra free-market ideology” that he claimed made it impossible to enact change.

He said. “I was incredibly frustrated on health. More people die every year as a result of diet than died during the worst Covid year.”

He criticised one of the few policies the Government has introduced, mandatory calorie labelling on menus, as “a bad policy for good reasons.”

He said: “What a policy like that does is creates a lot of bureaucracy, p ***** everyone off, doesn’t have an effect.”

Since leaving the Government, Mr Dimbleby has set up Bramble, a £50m venture capital fund to invest in companies and technologies aiming to improve food system sustainability.

A spokesman said the Government was “taking strong action to encourage healthier food choices and tackle obesity”. They added: “The Government Food Strategy set out our vision for a prosperous agri-food sector and a healthier society, and we built on these foundations last year with the Downing Street Farm to Fork Summit – now an annual event.”