Update, September 2026: This article was originally published in May 2025. Since then, the Soft Drinks Industry Levy rates rose in April 2026, and the Government confirmed further changes from 1 January 2028: the lower threshold will fall from 5g to 4.5g of sugar per 100ml and the exemptions for milk-based and milk-substitute drinks with added sugar will be removed. We have also corrected passages that overstated the evidence on non-sugar sweeteners. The opinion remains Reshmi’s.
When queuing in a corner shop the other day I saw a boy about 10 years old plonking two bottles of sugar-free Cherryade on the counter. He looked up at the cashier, bold as brass, and said: “Mum says it’s all right, it’s healthy.” Not that anyone was judging in the first place. But "Healthy"? That word is a messy muddle. When the UK Government's sugar tax arrived in 2018, it was sold as a public-health intervention designed to encourage reformulation. Seven years on, we were unquestionably leaner on sucrose in many drinks, but also surrounded by more products using aspartame, acesulfame-K, sucralose, stevia and other sweeteners. At the time this article was published, the Government was consulting on tightening the levy further. My question was whether swapping sugar for another route to intense sweetness was really the whole answer to Britain's obesity problem.
Britain’s craving for sweetness runs deep. Medieval apothecaries sold “tonics” laced with honey for the well-to-do; Georgian naval surgeons issued daily rations of grog cut with molasses; the Victorians embraced fizzy lemonade as the favoured tipple in temperance halls. By the 1980s we were chugging Sunny D and Panda Pops, fuelled by cheap Caribbean cane and the belief that a low-fat biscuit, never mind the sugar, was practically a health food.
When the levy arrived in 2018, drinks with at least 5g of sugar per 100ml entered the lower band and those with at least 8g entered the higher band. When this article was published in May 2025, the rates were 19.4p and 25.9p per litre respectively. From April 2026 they rose to 20.8p and 27.8p per litre. HMRC publishes the current bands and rates here.
Industry saw the incentive and reformulated heavily. Many manufacturers cut sugar, reduced portion sizes or used non-sugar sweeteners. Whatever one thinks of the mechanism, the reduction in sugar across the category is real; the harder question is what consumers make of the replacement formulations and whether preserving the same level of sweetness is desirable.
In 2023 the World Health Organisation recommended against using non-sugar sweeteners for weight control or as a strategy to reduce diet-related disease risk. Its review found no clear long-term weight-control benefit, while observational evidence showed associations with outcomes including type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. That is not the same as proving that sweeteners cause those diseases. WHO explicitly says the guideline is not a toxicological safety assessment and does not replace established safe-intake guidance.
A small 2022 Cell study added an interesting wrinkle: some non-sugar sweeteners produced individualised changes in gut microbiome composition and glycaemic responses. It is useful research, but it does not justify the sweeping claim that ordinary sweetener consumption has been shown to cause cancers, liver disease or other long lists of illnesses. The evidence is more complicated than that, and our original wording overstated it.
Taste, meanwhile, has taken its own beating. Sugar’s charm lies in its time span: a slow swell across the tongue, gentle, floral, balanced. Sucralose delivers a swift jab, then retreats with a twang of tinfoil; stevia layers on a weird medicinal after-taste. Lemonade now tastes like pennies soaked in lemon air-freshener. Sanpellegrino’s once-big-and-bold blood orange Aranciata is now meh. A chef friend once said he'd rather have paint thinner than diet ginger beer. Consumers notice; they just don’t always know why.
Money muddies the waters further. Sweeteners can be much cheaper to use than sugar and the levy creates another strong incentive to reformulate. At the time of writing in 2025, the price gap between some sugared branded drinks and supermarket diet alternatives was striking. Those shelf-price examples were snapshots, not permanent price comparisons, but the broader point remains: price nudges behaviour just as surely as health messaging does.
And what about choice? Scan a soft-drink aisle and you’ll find the new recipes wearing their sugar-free halos proudly, while the sweetener declaration is usually in the ingredients list. For people who dislike the taste or find particular polyols disagree with them, that label matters.
There is an environmental question too, but my original wording was too sweeping. Sugar has land, water, fertiliser and processing impacts; high-intensity sweeteners have their own manufacturing and supply-chain impacts. Which is lower-carbon depends on the ingredient, formulation and lifecycle boundary. Stevia, in particular, should not have been described as a petrochemical derivative.
Nor would it be fair to call the levy an unqualified failure. It clearly accelerated reformulation and reduced sugar in many soft drinks. The unresolved question is whether public health is best served when products remain every bit as intensely sweet. Childhood obesity remains a serious problem, but that fact alone does not prove the levy failed.
The next phase is now clearer than it was when this article was written. From 1 January 2028, the lower threshold is due to fall from 5g to 4.5g per 100ml and the exemptions for milk-based and milk-substitute drinks with added sugar are due to be removed. HMRC sets out those changes here. That makes the debate about formulation, sweetness and informed choice more relevant, not less.
So what might a smarter fix taste like? We could follow the salt-reduction playbook of the early noughties: dial sweetness down little by little, give palates a chance to reset, and skip the automatic one-for-one sweetness swap. We could demand clearer front-of-pack information for sweeteners, so parents and tricky guts choose knowingly. We could earmark more levy revenue for healthier public options. Or hey, I know it's a radical idea, but maybe treat sugary pop as a rare treat and champion water that actually tastes of water.
Back in the corner shop the young cherryade kid was still negotiating with his mum, arguing “zero means nothing”. I was tempted to step in, but bit my tongue not least because I'm too British to pipe up. It isn’t a kid’s job to unpick a complicated nutrition debate. That burden rests with the grown-ups - legislators, scientists, manufacturers and, yes, consumers.
And let's keep reminding ourselves that "Sweet is a Treat". It's not your birthday every day, so you don't eat birthday cake every day. And when you do eat cake, make sure it's one that's worth the calories, made with real sugar, real butter and tastes like a real treat.
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