‘What food subsidies or taxes should the UK government use to make healthier and sustainable foods more affordable?’ This was the question put to local people who attended a deliberative forum in Bridlington, East Yorkshire, over (a significantly cooler) two days in October 2023. The event was hosted by the COPPER research team, including Pete Scarborough, Hannah Forde, Jess Renzella and Lucy Yates.
Funded by the NIHR, the COPPER project aims to work with the public and policymakers to co-design food subsidy and tax scenarios. These scenarios will then be modelled to estimate their impact on health, health inequalities, household economics, macroeconomics and the environment. The project is a collaboration between the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), University of Exeter, University of Reading and the Food Foundation.
The idea of the deliberative forum was to bring together people from the local community to review evidence and come to a group decision on an issue that’s important to society: the food subsidies and taxes that could make healthier and sustainable food more affordable in the UK.
The top four policies that the attendees of the Bridlington deliberative forum voted for were a tax on high carbon foods, a tax on unhealthy foods, a tax on red and processed meat and a subsidy on locally produced food.
We had thoughtful input from the participants in the deliberative forum and the COPPER team wanted to find a way to return to Bridlington and share the results of the deliberative forum more widely with the local community. This would also allow us to capture how far the wider community favoured the same food values and to amplify these voices in reporting back to the NIHR and policymakers.
We were lucky to be awarded extra funding for this engagement activity from the University of Oxford Medical Sciences Division’s Participatory Research Seed Fund.
Read the full story on the the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences website.