It is known that people care about their health. It is also known that around half of all illness is linked to choices people make in their everyday lives – whether that is the choice to smoke, drink excessively or eat too much and exercise too little. For this reason, governments have increasingly focused on helping people to make different choices. But people don’t smoke or drink too much because they are ignorant, stupid or perverse – rather, it is the combination of the enjoyment that they get from these things and wider social or other environmental factors that mean they find it hard to adopt healthier behaviours. A key challenge for the Government, therefore, is how best to use scarce taxpayer resources to help people make the right choices for them.The challenge in writing this report was to build on current approaches, using the latest evidence from areas such as behavioural economics and psychology, to suggest ways in which the Government could become more effective in this area, to help people to make healthier choices where they wish to do so. In support of this work, three main tasks were carried out : a literature review and initial discussions with some key practitioners and academics; two seminars with a wider group of experts in the field, drawn from academia, local and national government, business and the third sector; and qualitative research to investigate the public’s views of their own experiences and the Government’s role in behaviour change. Selection of participants was based on a segmentation model developed specifically by the Department of Health. (Author/publisher)
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