Wes Streeting's Half-Baked Obesity Strategy: Why Voluntary Partnerships Won't Fix a Systemic Crisis

Watching Wes Streeting tackle obesity with voluntary partnerships is rather like watching someone try to fix a hurricane with a strongly worded letter to the wind. As NHS hospital treatments for obese patients quadruple from 442,083 in 2013/14 to almost 1.9 million in 2023/24, the Health Secretary's response reveals not just a troubling disconnect between the scale of the crisis and policy response, but a charmingly naive belief that the same food industry that created the problem will voluntarily solve it—presumably out of the goodness of their quarterly earnings reports.

This represents half-baked thinking at its most consequential: applying linear solutions to complex systems problems whilst displaying all the systems awareness of a goldfish approaching a shark convention.

The Magnificent Failure of 700 Policies

The obesity epidemic provides a masterclass in how to spectacularly miss the point for three decades running. Obesity levels increased from 15% in 1993 to 29% in 2022, despite nearly 700 wide-ranging policies proposed between 1992 and 2020. That's roughly 25 policies per year of creative failure—enough bureaucratic creativity to fill several filing cabinets and achieve absolutely nothing except providing future PhD students with rich material on how not to govern.

The system has been beautifully designed to produce exactly the outcomes we're getting. Like a perfectly calibrated machine for creating obesity, it features ultra-processed foods that cause an increase in ad libitum energy intake of approximately 500 kcal per day, whilst making healthier foods more than twice as expensive per calorie. The most deprived fifth of the population would need to spend 45% of their disposable income on food to afford the government-recommended healthy diet—roughly the same percentage most people spend on housing. Apparently, we've accidentally created a food system where eating well requires the financial planning of a mortgage application.

The Delicious Irony of Voluntary Self-Regulation

Streeting's voluntary partnership model displays the kind of touching faith in corporate altruism typically reserved for children writing letters to Father Christmas. The approach ignores decades of evidence showing that asking the food industry to self-regulate is rather like asking foxes to design more secure henhouses—theoretically possible, but requiring a fundamental misunderstanding of incentive structures.

Perhaps his Christian values, with their emphasis on individual moral agency and personal redemption, make it particularly difficult to embrace the kind of structural determinism that effective obesity policy requires—ironically leaving Labour, traditionally the party of collective solutions, relegating personal responsibility to the back burner whilst hoping that corporate responsibility will somehow emerge through the power of positive thinking and strongly worded memoranda of understanding.

Industry tactics consistently include manufacturing doubt, aggressive marketing, and regulatory capture, where regulatory agencies become captured in their evaluation of food industry innovations. It's a system so elegant in its dysfunction that one almost admires its efficiency: over US$500 billion in agricultural subsidies distributed globally, with the vast majority harmful for health and the environment, whilst over a third of food advertising spend goes on confectionary and soft drinks compared to just 2% for fruit and vegetables. This isn't accident—it's emergent design.

The Fractal Nature of Food System Dysfunction

What's particularly fascinating from a systems perspective is how dysfunction emerges at every scale. At the neighbourhood level, a quarter of places to buy food in England are fast-food outlets, rising to nearly one in three in the most deprived areas—creating what urbanists call "food swamps" where the healthiest option might be a slightly less processed pizza. At the retail level, over a third of supermarket promotions target unhealthy items, because apparently someone decided the best way to help families struggling with cost-of-living was to make diabetes more affordable.

At the agricultural level, we subsidise precisely the wrong things—commodity crops for ultra-processed foods rather than the fruits and vegetables we desperately need people to eat more of. It's like funding a fire department that specialises in arson prevention by providing matches and petrol to known pyromaniacs, then wondering why fire incidents keep increasing.

The beauty of complex systems is how small rules create large patterns. The simple rule "make what's profitable" has created an entire food ecosystem optimised for overconsumption of precisely the foods that drive obesity. Every actor in the system—from farmers to manufacturers to retailers—is rationally responding to incentives that collectively produce an irrational outcome. It's emergence in action, just not the kind anyone sensible would design.

The Network Effects of Nonsense

The interconnected nature of the food system means that every intervention creates cascading effects throughout the network. When Amsterdam implemented active urban design and school-level food policies, they achieved a 12% reduction in childhood obesity in four years—not because they asked nicely, but because they changed the rules of the game across multiple domains simultaneously.

Compare this to Streeting's approach, which appears to operate on the theory that if you change nothing systemically, but ask very nicely, somehow different outcomes will emerge. It's rather like trying to change the direction of a river by having a polite conversation with individual water molecules.

The network effects work in both directions. Mexico's sugar-sweetened beverage tax—a single intervention—triggered reformulation across entire product categories, reduced consumption patterns, and is predicted to prevent 239,900 cases of obesity over 10 years. One policy lever pulled the right way created beneficial cascades throughout the entire system.

The Feedback Loops of Futility

Perhaps the most amusing aspect of voluntary approaches is how they create perverse feedback loops. The worse the obesity crisis becomes, the more urgent the need for "partnership" with industry appears, which increases industry influence over policy design, which ensures policies remain ineffective, which makes the crisis worse, which increases the apparent need for more partnerships. It's a perfect self-reinforcing cycle that provides everyone with the appearance of action whilst guaranteeing continued failure.

Meanwhile, the economic feedback loops operate with ruthless efficiency in the opposite direction. The £2.4 billion spent annually on public sector food represents enormous purchasing power that could transform markets overnight—but only if connected to clear standards and outcomes. Instead, it flows through existing supply chains, reinforcing current patterns whilst providing no signal for systemic change.

The Holistic Architecture of Real Solutions

Proper systems thinking recognises that obesity emerges from the dynamic interaction between economic incentives, built environments, social policies, educational systems, agricultural practices, and regulatory frameworks. Change any one element in isolation and the system adapts around it. Change multiple elements simultaneously and you get phase transitions—sudden, dramatic shifts to new stable states.

The French subsidised school fruit and vegetable programme succeeds because it's embedded within a national strategy linking farmers, public procurement, and health—creating aligned incentives across the entire food chain. Copenhagen sources over 90% organic food for public institutions not through voluntary partnerships, but through procurement policies that make sustainable, healthy food profitable for suppliers whilst supporting local farming systems.

These approaches work because they recognise that food systems are complex adaptive networks, not mechanical problems requiring technical fixes. They address the economic architecture that makes junk food the default profitable choice, whilst creating new feedback loops that reward healthy food production and distribution.

Real systemic reform would shift subsidies from commodity crops like sugar beet and rapeseed oil to fruits, vegetables, pulses, and whole grains—creating upstream economic incentives for healthy food production. It would introduce healthy VAT reform, removing VAT from healthy staples whilst adding it to ultra-processed foods, using proceeds to fund food access schemes. This creates new economic architecture where healthy food becomes cheaper at source through aligned incentives, not corporate charity.

The Inequality Multiplier Effect

The holistic view reveals how obesity both reflects and amplifies social inequalities through multiple interconnected pathways. Food insecurity is health insecurity, which becomes educational inequality (through poor concentration and attendance), which becomes employment inequality (through reduced qualifications and health), which becomes housing inequality (through reduced income), which reinforces food insecurity. It's a beautifully vicious cycle that voluntary partnerships will disrupt about as effectively as a chocolate teapot addresses climate change.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies found that universal free school meals improved concentration, academic attainment, and reduced BMI in low-income groups—because it interrupted multiple inequality feedback loops simultaneously. When you provide healthy food to children, you don't just address nutrition; you address educational outcomes, family financial stress, social stigma, and community health patterns. That's systems thinking in action.

Beyond Magical Thinking

What distinguishes systems thinking from magical thinking is the willingness to acknowledge that complex problems require coordinated responses that address root causes rather than symptoms. Streeting's voluntary partnership approach operates on the same logic as assuming that if you ask gravity very nicely, objects might start falling upwards.

The evidence for effective obesity interventions is overwhelming: subsidies for fruits and vegetables show potential returns on investment of more than 200:1. Sugar taxes work. Public procurement policies work. Advertising restrictions work. Urban design interventions work. What doesn't work is hoping that voluntary industry goodwill will somehow overcome market incentives that have operated consistently for decades.

The current approach ensures we'll get another decade of child obesity headlines, corporate press releases about "commitment to health," and politicians expressing surprise that asking foxes to guard henhouses hasn't solved the poultry security crisis. Meanwhile, the tools for real systemic change sit unused, presumably because they require the kind of political courage that voluntary partnerships are specifically designed to avoid.

The tragedy isn't that we don't know how to address obesity—it's that we keep pretending we don't, whilst implementing policies designed to fail safely rather than succeed dangerously. In complex systems, half-measures don't produce half-results; they produce the illusion of action whilst preserving the status quo. And in the case of obesity, the status quo is literally killing us—just very politely and with excellent corporate social responsibility reports.