I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, but the point is that we wanted to respond to the issue about whether a sugar tax is regressive. It is much more challenging to use a direct replacement for the sugar, which would mean zero sugar for those kinds of products. That was partly why we took that view.
However, the approach that we recommend for the kind of products that the hon. Gentleman has mentioned is one of reformulation. During the last decade, there has been a successful programme of reformulating salt within our processed foods, but such a change takes time, because we have to adjust the nation’s palate gradually. Yes, we can make bigger step changes if we replace part of the sugar in one go, but there is sometimes something about the chemistry of sugar within cookery that means a sugar substitute does not do the same job. We wanted a tax where a sugar substitute did the same job as sugar, in effect.
I am confident that reformulation will be part of the Government’s response, because there is clear evidence that it works. Having said that, we know that it works better when there is some teeth to it, so I urge the Minister to go further than the responsibility deal and have something with real teeth. Things worked better when we had the Food Standards Agency and a bit of a stick in the background to make such changes happen, and industry wants a level playing field.