• Media Enquiries

    07505 448925(24hr)

Nanny state meets the Big Brother state

Pic of food It takes a special sort of authoritarian to come up with the scheme devised by Gloucestershire County Council and NHS Gloucestershire to apparently 'help promote healthier packed lunches'.

As the Daily Mail explains:

A council has scrapped a scheme to encourage healthy eating in schools after it emerged teachers were 'spying' on pupils' and photographing the contents of their lunchboxes.

Contents were taken out to ensure children are not identified and then photographs detailing the nutritional content were recorded.

Staff then rated the items in each packed lunch against a set of standards, analysing fat, salt and sugar levels and whether they included fruit and vegetables. The food was photographed and rated on a sliding scale of one to five so that a baseline score for the school was formed.

The results were then analysed and results sent to parents in a letter advising them how to improve childrens' eating habits.

I would suspect that the parents are well aware of the contents of their own child's lunch box. But even so, the photographs and rating system just smack of the worst kind of unnecessary surveillance and nanny-state interference.

You can educate and inform – but this is the kind of hectoring and moaning that is completely unacceptable.

By Dylan Sharpe

Posted on July 2, 2010 by Big Brother Watch Posted in Overbearing state
  • Pete

    Well at the very least it makes it easy for us to see where some budget cuts can be made.
    Anyone with time enough to do this is underemployed

  • http://sbml.wordpress.com SadButMadLad

    And how much effort did it take someone to do this job. If it was a teacher they should have been teaching. If it was someone hired specifically to do this job, their salary would have been better spent on books for the kids. In any case the staff who organised this should be sacked for malfeasance in a public office for being such a waste of space. God I sound like a DailyFail reader! :-)
    This quote from the article says a lot.
    “A spokeswoman for Gloucestershire county council refused to disclose its healthy schools budget which is shared with NHS Gloucestershire.
    She said the packed lunch audit was one of dozens of projects being carried out and only cost officer time to draw up the toolkit. She was unable to provide a figure.”
    So some staff member who probably didn’t have anything to do was given this task. They probably spent a few minutes knocking up a quick document with loads of newspeak, long words, acronyms and bingo words such as “stakeholders”. They then think this is the total cost of the overall project. Nothing enters their tiny little minds that someone has to spend time and effort doing the actual work.

  • Purlieu

    “A spokeswoman for Gloucestershire county council refused to disclose its healthy schools budget which is shared with NHS Gloucestershire”
    Have these people forgotten who pays their wages ?

  • Biffo

    Couldn’t that information be requested under the FOI – in which case they’d find themselves in deep shit for not complying?