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As Education Minister, Chris Hipkins considered banning sugary drinks in schools to combat obesity and poor dental health, but Labour deferred work on the plans until after the election. With the new Government now saying it is not a priority, Alex Spence reports that health experts fear the idea is dead.
Plans to ban sugary drinks in schools, delayed by Labour in the run-up to last year’s general election, are no longer a government priority, Education Minister Erica Stanford has said.
Health experts said they were disappointed the plans had fallen through the bureaucratic cracks and urged the National-led coalition to reconsider banning sugary drinks to improve nutrition and dental health in schools.
Opposition leader Chris Hipkins floated the idea when he was Education Minister three years ago. In 2022, the Ministry of Education held a public consultation on a proposed ban and respondents overwhelmingly said they supported imposing a duty on primary and secondary schools to promote and provide only healthy drinks, such as water or low-fat milk.
Minister of Education Erica Stanford, left, says a ban on fizzy drinks is not a priority. Photo / Jason Dorday
While most primary schools already have water-only policies in place, only a minority of high schools have adopted similar measures. Health experts say many high school students can still get sugary juice and fizzy drinks at canteens and tuck shops, which contribute to poor oral health and preventable chronic diseases such as obesity and type 2 diabetes.
Despite strong support for national restrictions, officials persuaded Labour ministers to hold off until they could do more research on how a ban would affect secondary schools. Initially, a national fact-finding exercise was scheduled to be done by the end of last year. Then, in July, officials asked Jan Tinetti, Hipkins’ successor as Education Minister, to delay these “report-backs” until December 2024.
In a briefing to Tinetti, officials acknowledged that pushing back this groundwork would be a “missed opportunity to make timely progress” on an initiative that could help to reduce high rates of obesity, poor oral health, diabetes, and other health problems in school-age children. But they said restricting unhealthy drinks would remain “important to this ministry” and preliminary work on the evidence-gathering exercise would start in the new year.
Since then, though, there has been a change of government, and officials at the ministry have instead been focused on implementing the Coalition’s main education priorities, such as introducing new daily mandates for reading, writing, and maths, and banning cellphones in classrooms.
Jennifer Fraser, the Ministry of Education’s general manager of schools policy, said the department has “yet to recommence” its work toward limiting sugary drinks. Stanford, the Education Minister, has not received advice from officials on whether to continue the policy since she took office in November.
Asked whether Stanford had a view on whether schools should be compelled to restrict sugary drinks, a representative said: “It’s not a priority for the Minister right now.”
Tinetti told the Herald it was “disappointing to hear the Government isn’t progressing work to help kids make healthy choices at school”, but health experts said they were frustrated Labour did not impose an obligation on schools to remove fizzy drinks when it had the opportunity.
Jan Tinetti, the former Education Minister, approved a request from officials to delay the groundwork for a fizzy drink ban until December 2024. Photo / Mark Mitchell
“We were extremely disappointed in that stance,” said Dr Rob Beaglehole, a Dental Association spokesman, of the previous Government’s decision not to proceed immediately after the consultation. “It was a missed opportunity.”
Professor Boyd Swinburn, co-chair of the Health Coalition Aotearoa, which represents a group of health charities, said the previous government was “totally gutless” in failing to ban sugary drinks in schools despite overwhelming support for it.
“They just booted it into touch,” Swinburn said. “And the kids are the ones that are missing out.”
Under Hipkins, the Ministry of Education initially intended to impose a requirement only on primary schools, most of which already have water-only policies. But when a public consultation was held between April and July 2022, 86 per cent of submissions that indicated a policy preference favoured also requiring secondary schools to restrict unhealthy drinks.
In its submission, the Heart Foundation said: “Without inclusion in the duty these students will become a lost cohort and will miss the opportunity to improve their health and wellbeing before becoming adults. Lack of regulation in secondary schools leads to a contradictory environment whereby the school curriculum is teaching students about food and nutrition in the classroom but not enabling them to practice this learning on the food grounds with their food purchasing.”
However, officials told ministers there was a “lack of understanding” about how banning fizzy drinks would impact high schools and they asked for more time to gather evidence.
At the time of the consultation, the Act Party, a partner in the Coalition Government, described the proposed ban as the “worst kind of nanny statism from a Labour Government that only knows how to ban and tax stuff it doesn’t like”.
Belinda Milnes, director of public affairs at the NZ Beverage Council, said Labour’s proposed ban was “overkill”, since the industry had already agreed voluntarily to not sell sugar-sweetened carbonated soft drinks to secondary schools. “The industry has already taken significant steps to self-regulate.”
Beaglehole, at the Dental Association, argued the new Government had swiftly ordered schools to act on another public health issue – banning phones – without waiting to gather evidence on how they would manage it.
“We need the Government to show leadership,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense to be selling sickness to kids in schools.”
This story has been updated to include a comment from the NZ Beverage Council.
Alex Spence is an investigative reporter and feature writer who tends to focus on social issues. He joined the Herald in 2020 after 17 years in London where he worked for The Times, Politico, and BuzzFeed News. He can be reached at alex.spence@nzme.co.nz or by text or secure Signal messaging on 0272358834.
