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    Bad Habits, Hard Choices: Using the Tax System to Make Us Healthier
    Bad Habits, Hard Choices: Using the Tax System to Make Us Healthier
    Bad Habits, Hard Choices: Using the Tax System to Make Us Healthier
    Ebook115 pages1 hour

    Bad Habits, Hard Choices: Using the Tax System to Make Us Healthier

    By David Fell

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    About this ebook

    Consumers in Britain face a curious mix of taxes and duties that are messy, opaque and out of date. They are also unfair: the poorer you are, the more of your income goes on paying these taxes. At the same time, we are ceaselessly bombarded by marketing information that is very one-sided. The foods that make us fat, for example, are promoted a great deal more than the foods that could keep us healthy – and again it is mainly the poor who bear the brunt. This book draws on insights from behavioural economics, participative decision-making and the author’s twenty-five-year research career to take a fresh look at these issues. It concludes that there is a fair, inclusive, adaptable, affordable and resilient way of enabling us to eat healthily and to tackle the obesity crisis. The author proposes that negative VAT should be charged on healthy foods and high VAT should be charged on unhealthy foods. The book sets out a four-step process to actually implement this new regime, each step of which depends on mechanisms that have already been used by government. It is a bold yet practical proposition for tackling one of the most costly and damaging challenges we face.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLondon Publishing Partnership
    Release dateMar 2, 2016
    ISBN9781907994517
    Bad Habits, Hard Choices: Using the Tax System to Make Us Healthier
    Author

    David Fell

    David Fell is a researcher, writer, presenter and activist in the field of sustainable economics. He is director and co-founder of the research and strategy consultancy Brook Lyndhurst. David has a degree in economics from Cambridge University; he has twenty-five years’ research and strategy experience for clients in the government, private and not-for-profit sectors; and he was a founding commissioner on the London Sustainable Development Commission.

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      Book preview

      Bad Habits, Hard Choices - David Fell

      fell-front-cover.jpg

      Copyright © 2016 David Fell

      Published by London Publishing Partnership

      www.londonpublishingpartnership.co.uk

      Published in association with Enlightenment Economics

      www.enlightenmenteconomics.com

      All Rights Reserved

      ISBN: 978-1-907994-51-7 (ebk)

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      This book has been composed in Candara

      
Copy-edited and typeset by T&T Productions Ltd, London www.tandtproductions.com

      Cover art by Kate Prentice

      Preface

      In many ways this book is a continuation of what I now realize is a lifelong obsession with choice: what it is, how it works and why we make the choices that we do. It’s an obsession that is personal, professional, political and philosophical, as I think this book illustrates.

      Bad habits

      My professional research has covered a wide range of social and environmental choices that we as individuals and as a society make. It is, however, the choices we make about food that have been the most pronounced focus of my work over the past couple of decades. My obsession hinges, I think, on the scale of the mismatch between the choices we say we want to make and the choices we actually make. We all want to be healthy; but we eat and drink in ways that make us ill.

      So in this book I’ve taken the opportunity to step back from the specifics of food waste, animal welfare, use-by dates and air miles to go as deep as I can into the whys and wherefores of the choices we make about food.

      I draw on insights from behavioural economics, social psychology and linguistics to suggest that the narratives of modern marketing have been comprehensively internalized by the majority of the population. These narratives frame some choices as ‘good’ and some as ‘bad’.

      The choices we make as consumers are frequently good for capitalism and bad for us. Over-buying and over-eating are conspicuous examples. The persistence of these bad habits, I argue, is the outcome of the mismatch in power between corporatized marketing, on the one hand, and frail and fallible individuals, on the other. Expecting individuals each to overcome their bad habits is misguided. An effective solution needs to redress the power imbalance and has therefore to be of significant institutional scale.

      Hard choices

      Introducing the notion of ‘commitment strategies’ developed by the Nobel-winning economist Thomas Schelling, and considering also the techniques of deliberative democracy, I then explain and illustrate how power imbalances can be redressed in ways that are inclusive, fair, adaptable and resilient.

      I go on to suggest that a suitably configured ‘socially determined commitment strategy’ has the potential to counteract the power of modern marketing and to frame a new narrative in which healthy eating is both straightforward and – crucially – affordable.

      Four steps

      I set out a concrete proposition for how such a strategy could be introduced. I propose that negative VAT should be charged on healthy foods and high VAT should be charged on unhealthy foods. I set out a four-step process to implement this new regime, each step of which depends on mechanisms that have already been used by government.

      It is, I acknowledge, a bold proposition, and one that certainly goes far beyond the idea of a sugar tax or a fat tax. Indeed, in the final chapter I speculate on whether the basic idea could be extended to address an even wider range of social and environmental ills.

      Such speculation may be misplaced at this early stage, but it is perhaps consistent with the obsession that seems to have propelled this book into existence; and it is, in the end, no more than a choice I happen to have made.

      Acknowledgements

      To Diane, Richard and Sam; James and Alex; Paul, Samantha, Robin, Lilian, Tim, Jayne, Rachel, Martin, Alice, David, Xristina and Inge; and everyone at Brook Lyndhurst – thank you. You all helped, or hindered constructively, and I am grateful.

      Chapter 1

      Let’s go shopping

      I’m all lost in the supermarket

      — The Clash

      Just like millions of other people, last week I went shopping. Nothing special: a trip to the supermarket. I bought my usual groceries, enough for the week’s meals. I bought a couple of bottles of wine, too. I’m lucky: I earn just enough not to pay too much attention to the prices. I put the things I wanted in the trolley, picking up a few things I hadn’t intended to buy, but comfortable that I was avoiding anything exorbitantly expensive.

      Generally I try to buy organic or Fairtrade or locally produced food if I can, but I don’t try all that hard. If there’s an attractive bargain, or the price of the ethical alternative seems too high, I’ll edit my choices ­accordingly. Most of the time – and this was certainly the case last week – I rely on my usual brands. I always buy Lavazza coffee, for example. I’m not sure why: there are dozens of types of coffee on the shelf, and I’ve tried just a handful.

      At the till, just like millions of other people, I did my part of the deal – unloading and then reloading my trolley – before handing over my plastic. I typed my four memorable digits into the little black rectangle, glanced at the bill and headed out of the shop.

      I’d arranged to meet a good friend for a drink that same day, so once I’d dumped all the shopping into the cupboards and the fridge at home I set off in my car. I stopped at the petrol station, stocked up on fuel, chocolate and – ahem – cigarettes, and drove the thirty-odd miles to Hertfordshire. It wasn’t a particularly long evening: we ate a light meal, had a couple of drinks, two coffees, and then I headed home.

      My bill in the supermarket was £78.24. At the petrol station I spent £64.97 on fuel, £3 on chocolate and £9.69 on cigarettes. In the evening I spent £12.50 on my meal, £8.40 on two pints of beer and £4.60 on two cups of coffee. All told, £181.40.

      In my book, that’s quite a steep day. I know that the groceries and the petrol will last me a few days, but even so – nearly two hundred pounds!

      The real shocker, though, is that without knowing I was doing so I had paid out £43.20 in tax.

      My monthly salary slip tells me exactly how much tax I’ve paid; why not the slip at the checkout? This seems odd. It can’t be that hard, surely, to display how much of the price of each item on the shelf is tax? Then, if I wanted, I could make different choices and avoid paying that tax.

      And why am I paying taxes on some of the items and not others? Is it an untrustworthy government fleecing me yet again? Or are they trying to discourage me from driving and smoking and drinking (and if it is that, why not make it ­clearer)? Or perhaps it’s just a ridiculous mess: a porridge of out-of-date ideas and priorities, as uncomfortable and daunting for the officials, politicians and statisticians as it is opaque, confusing and unfair for the rest of us. Maybe it’s all of the above?

      This book is about how to sort this mess out – not for the sake of it, but to show how we could use something boring like tax to do really exciting things like help people lose weight and live well, and perhaps even help to save the planet.

      Our VAT system – in fact, our entire edifice of ‘consumer-facing taxes’ – is both damaging and

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