Chamber and committees

We set out in 2018 Diet and Healthy Weight Delivery Plan ambitious and wide-ranging action to deliver our vision for a Scotland where everyone eats well and has a healthy weight. The Delivery Plan is at https://www.gov.scot/publications/healthier-future-scotlands-diet-healthy-weight-delivery-plan/

We are taking forward a range of action across five key outcomes: giving children the best start in life; creating a healthier food environment; better access to weight management services; leadership and reducing health inequalities.

We have set a challenging ambition to halve childhood obesity by 2030. With a primary focus on prevention, the actions we are taking include:

• updating nutritional guidance for school foods regulations, and early learning and childcare settings to give children more access to nutritious food
• providing over £5 million in additional investment over the past three years, to NHS Boards and launched a Breastfeeding Friendly Scotland scheme to promote, support and protect breastfeeding
• providing free vitamin D to infants, pregnant and breastfeeding women
• continuing to provide £1.7 million in 2020-21 to improve weight management services for children and young people, ensuring consistent quality and equity of access to evidence-based support across Scotland
• providing over £600,000 of funding to ten NHS board-led projects working with families to help prevent and reduce levels of childhood obesity.

We are taking actions to narrow the obesity inequality gap among children. We are, among other things:

• making over £130 million available this financial year to tackle food insecurity caused by the pandemic, including over £44 million to local authorities to continue the delivery of free school meal provision over school closures and holidays up to and including Easter holidays in April 2021
• investing over £11.7 million to date in the Best Start Foods card payment scheme, which launched in August 2019
• providing £302,000 this financial year to the Healthy Living Programme (HLP) to encourage the sale of healthier products in convenience retail stores, with a particular focus on communities within areas of deprivation
• making available an additional £30,000 to the HLP this financial year to support a cooking at home campaign.

Furthermore, the Scottish Government has commenced a broad range of actions aimed at tackling the multifaceted problem of poor dietary health and high rates of overweight and obesity. The more prominent of these are described below.

Since 2018, we have provided around £300,000 core funding to help regional community food networks target local initiatives where need is greatest. We have supplemented this with a further offer of around £100,000 this financial year to mitigate the additional impact of the pandemic.

We are investing £200,000 over a three year period (from 2018/19) to support Scottish small and medium-sized enterprises to reformulate commonly consumed products. This will enable Scottish food suppliers to have more opportunities to promote healthy, local produce.

When the new regulations governing nutritional standards for food and drink served in school come into effect on 8 April 2021, school food and drink will be healthier than before. They will replace the current regulations, which have been in place since August 2008.

We are supporting pilots of a Whole Systems Approach to improving diet and healthy weight, focussing on children and health inequalities. We have extended the pilot by an extra year – to March 2022 – given the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

We are working with Food Standards Scotland and Public Health Scotland (PHS) on a range of actions to support eating well out of home. With much of the sector currently struggling due to the pandemic, we will consider carefully the right time to progress this work.

We will progress legislation to restrict the promotion of foods high in fat, sugar or salt where they are sold to the public, having taken into account the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Given the links between overweight and obesity with Type 2 Diabetes, we published in 2018 the Framework for the Prevention, Early Detection and Early Intervention of Type 2 Diabetes . The Framework is at https://www.gov.scot/publications/healthier-future-framework-prevention-early-detection-early-intervention-type-2/

We are in year three of a programme to improve weight management services for people with, or at risk of developing, Type 2 Diabetes or prediabetes. We are looking to invest up to £5 million this financial year to support its delivery.

We will regularly monitor all commitments to ensure that progress continues to be made.