La tassa sullo zucchero nel Regno Unito verrà estesa a più bevande analcoliche e frappè

“The UK’s sugar tax will be extended to more soft drinks as well as milkshakes under plans to fight obesity to be set out on Tuesday.

Wes Streeting, the health secretary, will announce he is cutting the level at which the sugar tax is imposed after major brands changed their recipes to avoid the levy, threatening to catch some of Britain’s best-known drinks, according to two people briefed on the plans.

Milkshakes and pre-packaged coffees such as lattes and cappuccinos will also be included as ministers extend the levy to milk-based drinks for the first time. The sugar tax was introduced by George Osborne in 2016 as a levy on drinks with a sugar content of 5g per 100ml. This has led to numerous brands reformulating products to avoid the tax, widely hailed as a public health success.

However, officials believe it is now time to be more ambitious with many brands having sugar content just below 5g. Streeting will set out plans to lower the threshold to 4.5g per 100ml, catching drinks such as Pepsi.

Many well known brands such as Fanta and Irn-Bru sit at 4.5g and it is unclear if they will be caught by the tax. Milk-based drinks, originally exempted to protect children’s calcium intake, will now be included to end what a consultation described as an “anomaly”.

The tax rates, currently set at 19.4p per litre for drinks with a sugar content between 5g and 8g per 100ml and 25.9p above that, are also likely to be increased. Rates rose this year for the first time and a consultation proposed raising them with inflation for the next four years.”

This constant fiddling and Nanny State creep is just insane. I know it raises revenue and I know it appeases all the quangos that have been set up to focus narrowly on ‘issues’ but literally no-one actually voted for this.

It’s a systemic problem, because no individual company can fight it, and none is going to be the first to robustly argue against it, such is the suspicion against any business these days.

I’m a massive Diet Coke drinker but part of me hopes for some smoking-style revelation about aspartame in the future just so the technocrats that took against sugar get the opprobrium they deserve.

You will never convince me that artificial sweeteners are better for you than actual sugar.

A lot of drinks were absolutely ruined in an attempt to comply with the sugur tax, and now they’re delibrately fucking with the limits again to change it first.

Why not just tax anything above 0.5g (To avoid stuff with trace sugars) and be fucking done with it. Constantly fiddling with shit is causing massive uncertinty, the type of stuff that genuinely messes with buissness and pushes prices up.

More tax to pay then. Unfortunately sugar free alternative are never as good.

The ever expanding tax state

This country is throughly out of ideas and incredibly depressing

All soft drinks taste like shit since they brought in the sugar tax. Just carbonated water with a hint of taste. I got that used to it that I forgot what they actually tasted like until I went abroad. I also put on a ton of weight after they brought in the tax which is interesting to say the least. Ha