Kindly sponsored by the Food Standards Agency
Date: Tuesday 30th September, 18.00 - 19.00
Location: Room 110, First Floor, Jury's Inn
Speakers: Tim Loughton MP Jonathan Horrell, Kraft David Aaronovitch, Times Dame Deirdre Hutton, FSA
Chair: David Furness, SMF
Market-based instruments and tax incentives are the traditional mechanism for influencing behaviour and they remain important policy tools. However, many of the policy challenges facing government are not readily responsive to the traditional policy levers, such as taxation, particularly in areas like energy consumption, public health, savings and public order. We often ignore the many other instruments that could be used successfully to alter people’s behaviour and consumption patterns, including the use of social marketing, public education and alternative service delivery models. If policymakers have a better understanding of how people actually make decisions they will create policies and incentives that are both more effective and more efficient.
The now burgeoning science of behavioural economics attempts to take these lessons on board and at its heart is a simple and intuitive message: what we do and how we behave when making decisions is influenced by many things including habits, emotions, culture, and the example of others, as well as by cost and the availability of information. People are just as likely to do what they have always done or what their neighbours or friends generally do as to do what is financially most beneficial.
The impact of lifestyle choices on people’s health is a particular area in which the government is attempting to encourage changes in behaviour. Infectious diseases are no longer such a burden on health services; instead it is conditions like heart disease and cancer that require most attention. These conditions are affected by lifestyle – eating badly, drug and alcohol abuse, unprotected sex, smoking and lack of physical activity all contribute to the medical conditions that are now the top priority for the health service.
Preventing illness, not just curing it, is now recognised as an essential part of healthcare in the UK and is an absolute necessity to maintain affordability. As part of that shift, more effort has been placed on encouraging people to live healthier lives; we are seeing the beginnings of cultural change in this respect, but it is clear that more needs to be done. Added to this, there are a number of issues around the legitimacy of government intervention which need to be addressed in order to successfully encourage change.
Possible questions in the debate: