Is the Sugar Tax Making a Difference?

It's very difficult to get clear signals from this sort of policy evaluation where we're looking in the real world rather than doing controlled trials. We can't say for absolute certain tax is led to the change in obesity levels that we see but we can say that it's part of a jigsaw of lots of different pieces of emerging evidence. So we saw that coincident with the tax coming in we saw changes in the amount of sugar that was in drinks and that reflects that the tax encouraged manufacturers to reduce the sugar in their drinks. And we also saw decreases in purchasing of sugar from drinks. So all these things together make us think there is a story to be told.