Academics urge British Government to consider wider options in public health white paper

Nov 2 2004

The government's forthcoming public health white paper should consider other options aside from imposing personal obligations on individual citizens to take responsibility for their own health, if it is to succeed in improving the health of the nation, according to a leading health think tank.

In the second of three discussion papers on the topic of health obligations published today, Professor Edward Peck, Dr Perri 6 and Dr Sue Laverty from the University of Birmingham's Health Services Management Centre present the view that shifting the focus of obligations to public bodies and producers and distributors of unhealthy products could have a larger impact on public health.

They argue that regulating or even banning consumption or use of certain products can change habits and improve public health.  Targeting suppliers of widely acknowledged health "bads" such as cigarettes, alcohol and fatty foods with further regulatory measures could be key. Options to consider include:

• regulation to require information about health risks/quantities/levels of contents that may be harmful to health to be clearly available and labelled on the products themselves;
• price controls, taxes or subsidies to manipulate incentives to reduce consumption of less healthy and increase consumption of more healthy products and services;
• regulation to restrict access to products and practices deemed harmful, or increasing the enforcement of existing restrictions or increasing penalties for violation.

Perri 6, Senior Research Fellow at the Health Services Management Centre and responsible for leading this work, said today: "Personal responsibility for health may be an important moral theme for ministers to strike. There might even be a fiscal or a moral argument for introducing duties. But there is no evidence that individual obligations would significantly improve the health of the public, if that is the goal of policy. There is much better evidence for the effectiveness of using the tax system, regulating consumer information and product standards than there is for directly regulating people's behaviour."

The full discussion papers can be viewed on the Health Services Management Centre website at http://www.hsmc.bham.ac.uk/, where members of the public can also take part in an online discussion on health obligations.