Is the policy-making in the UK based on evidence? That is the question I address in my new book, Inside the Sausage Factory, in which I take four ‘public health’ policies from the 2010s and examine all the evidence that was cited for and against them in the media and in parliament. You would hope that policies pertaining to the health of the public would be more evidence-based than most, but that is not necessarily so. While campaigners for each of the policies – plain packaging for tobacco, minimum pricing for alcohol, the sugary drinks tax and the de facto prohibition of fixed-odds betting terminals – had plenty of peer-reviewed studies and expert reviews to wave around, this ‘evidence’ suffered from serious flaws. When the policies were eventually introduced, there was little sign that they made the slightest improvement to any of the problems they were supposed to address.
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Close examination of the campaigns which led to these four policies suggests that politicians did not make decisions based solely, or even mostly, on the evidence. It was claimed, for instance, that a Canadian province had seen the number of alcohol-related deaths fall by 32 per cent after a 10 per cent increase in the minimum price of alcohol. In fact, deaths rose significantly throughout the period in question. The modelling for the sugar tax, too, predicted a decline in obesity that never took place. The modelling of the relationship between alcohol-related deaths and minimum pricing in Scotland was wrong too. Instead of following facts, the government of the day bowed to political pressure whipped up by campaigners pushing policies had not existed until they came along. None of those policies had appeared in the manifestos of any of the main parties, with the exception of minimum pricing, which was mentioned by the Liberal Democrats in 2010 (and yet was never introduced in England).
