Should industry be information providers?

The new Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, floated the idea in a recent lecture to the Faculty of Public Health that the food industry would be asked to take on some of the burden of nutrition health education, hitherto funded and delivered by Government. If they did this properly, we understood, they would be spared burdensome regulation.

It was separately reported that, in a bonfire of quangos, the Food Standards Agency (FSA) was to be axed - and other bodies mentioned in the same breath included the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency! In fact it turns out that the FSA stays but with a reduced role (confined to food safety, while food policy goes to DEFRA and nutrition to the Department of Health).

Now I'm a board member of the Faculty of Public Health; and I worked on the FSA's communications when it was set up, so I'm parti pris. But I'm a bit of a consumerist too. I actually think that industry should be allowed to talk to consumers - as one voice among many. I believe that consumers are smart enough to know that industry has an axe to grind: people are able to look at what a company says and think "they would says that, wouldn't they?"

What seemed bizarre was to make industry the primary voice - instead of government. Mr Lansley asked us to accept that "lecturing or nannying" people to change their behaviour did not work, and said that businesses "understand the social responsibility of people having a better lifestyle and they don't regard that as remotely inconsistent with their long-term commercial interest".

"No government campaign or programme can force people to make healthy choices. We want to free business from the burden of regulation, but we don't want, in doing that, to sacrifice public health outcomes." Hmm.

Wait. This is all a trick, isn't it? He can't possibly be this dim. It's not feasible that a government minister would think that circles are really just a different type of squares, or that tigers are only really pussy cats with stripes.

Next up: let's abolish the medical and pharmaceutical regulators!

Doctors and pharmacos want to keep people alive, after all!

What could possibly go wrong?