11 July 2025

10 Year Health Plan for England: What it means for food & farming

🚑 What happened?

• Last week, the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, announced plans to make large food companies report their sales of healthy/unhealthy food.
• He then announced further details of a 10 Year Health Plan for England, focused on the NHS, including diet-related ill-health.
• The Plan aims to ‘create a new model of care, fit for the future’ based on the NHS’ founding principles of universal care, free at the point of delivery, and funded through general taxation.
• The overall goal is to ‘halve the gap in healthy life expectancy between the richest and poorest regions, while increasing it for everyone, and to raise the healthiest generation of children ever’.
• It will do this through three major shifts in the NHS; moving towards more community care, increased digitisation, and the big one for food (which we already knew) – moving from sickness to prevention.
• Read the Exec Summary or the whole Plan. 

🥦 What’s the vibe?

• The overall transformation is framed as one which will; ‘boost our health, but also ensure the future sustainability of the NHS and support economic growth’.
• The Plan says the NHS is in a ‘critical condition’ and ‘stands at an existential brink’.
• In a departure from the past – the Plan recognises; 
• The huge health inequalities that exist and describes these as an ‘intolerable injustice’.
• Without pressure alleviated, more people will seek private healthcare and this will ‘erode the principle of solidarity that has sustained the NHS’, and condemn it ‘to a poor service for poor people.’
• That a healthier population has broader economic benefits and the NHS could be ‘an engine for economic growth’.
• That health is shaped by our environment and is not just down to the individual, especially for children.
• That joined-up thinking and action across sectors and society is needed for prevention of ill-health (even if the Plan itself doesn’t do that as well as it could – see ‘what’s missing’ below).

🥕 Key commitments on food/ diet

I have shamelessly nicked this list from our pals at Sustain (read full piece). Commitments (many of which were already announced) include;

• NEW: Introduce mandatory sales reporting of healthy/unhealthy sales for large food businesses, and use the reporting to set future mandatory targets to make the average basket of foods sold healthier. See my digest last week on this.
• NEW: Updating the 2004 Nutrient Profiling Model on which current advertising restrictions are based.
• NEW: Restoring the value of the Healthy Start scheme, raising value of payments by just under 10% from £4.25 to £4.65 and double for children under 12 months.
• Banning the sale of energy drinks to children under 16 years old, estimated to reduce childhood obesity rates by 0.4%.
• Expanding free school meals so that all children with a parent in receipt of Universal Credit will be eligible for free school meals.
• Updating School Food Standards to align with latest health and nutritional guidance.
• Continue to drive innovations in the soft drinks industry, with the current consultation on lowering the entry threshold and ending the exemption for milk-based drinks for the Soft Drinks Industry Levy
• Restricting volume based price promotions of HFSS foods from 1 October 2025. However the plan also suggests that these regulations, plus restrictions on location-based promotions may be repealed in the future based on outcomes from mandatory sales reporting and targets.
• Restricting unhealthy food advertising targeting children.
• Use the revised National Planning Policy Framework to give local councils stronger powers to block new fast-food outlets near schools.

🚜 Reaction from food and farming

• Broadly, the plan has been welcomed by many in the food & health sectors. You can read the reaction from Sustain members here.
• Although as one comment on LinkedIn read, it’s more of a ‘vision and a deja-vu’, than a detailed plan of how to implement the actions and goals. More detail is needed.
• Others have also said the plans don’t go nearly far enough to tackle diet-related ill health and join the dots with food production and the economy.
• I can’t find any reaction online from farming-specific organisations (and neither can ChatGPT) – this could be for two reasons; 1) even though Defra has been involved in announcing the Plan and has said the Food Strategy will support it, there is nothing in the document about joining the dots with farming/ food production; 2) farming hasn’t yet grasped the opportunity of placing itself at the heart of the conversation about transforming the nation’s health (as it has done with climate change), or is potentially worried about what this might mean in terms of what it produces.

🫘 What’s missing?

• Truly joining the dots with food production/ farming/ Defra: While specific plans, like a Horticulture Strategy, are more likely to be announced in the forthcoming Food Strategy, there could still have been reference to the role food production and the food system play in health. But there was nothing – farming/ food production weren’t mentioned. 
• There’s a LOT more that could have been included on food and tackling diet-related ill-health: There are other organisations much better placed to comment on this, but one omission was any mention of public procurement of food for hospitals. I did find this from 2022 though  – perhaps someone else knows more about latest on this?
• Any mention of specific measures for the catering/ hospitality/ out-of-home sector (that’s my word search, maybe it’s mentioned under a different term?). I found this from the UK Hospitality membership organisation, which seemed to suggest a frustration with the vagueness in the plan.
• Joining the dots between food and the NHS’s decarbonisation strategy. 
• Joining the dots more with the Treasury on ensuring healthy food is accessible and affordable. I.e. it can’t just be about blocking fast food outlets (part of the plan), without encouraging/ enabling access to healthier food in those same communities.

💰 Further thoughts on corporate involvement in food/ health

There have been a number of concerns raised about transparency and the level of corporate involvement in shaping the standards and targets that have been announced as part of the 10 Year Health Plan. Please let me know if this is something you know about or can comment on (I’m looking into doing a piece on it).