Concerns over new Health Secretary Victoria Atkins’ ‘conflict of interest’ in war on obesity as it’s revealed 47-year-old’s husband is sugar tycoon

Conflict of interest concerns were today raised over the appointment of Victoria Atkins as Health Secretary.

Just hours after being handed a prominent role in Rishi Sunak’s cabinet reshuffle, details of Ms Atkins’ husband role as chief executive of a world-leading sugar firm circled online.

Department of Health chiefs said Ms Atkins ‘will recuse herself’ from decisions that may be impacted by ‘outside interests’ because of Paul Kenward’s role at ABF Sugar, which supplies supermarkets and food manufacturers.

In her previous role as drugs minister in the Home Office, she voluntarily ‘recused herself from policy or decisions relating to cannabis’ because of Kenward’s separate business portfolio — running a 23-acre site growing medicinal cannabis in Norfolk.

Anti-obesity campaigners still fear the 47-year-old’s decision-making in regards to stamping out Britain’s ever-expanding waistline could be skewed, however. 

Tam Fry, chairman of the National Obesity Forum, told MailOnline ‘there is potential for a conflict of interest’. 

‘I would hope it would not get in the way,’ he said. 

Mr Fry said that the risk of a conflict will ‘depend on how professional’ Ms Atkins is, adding: ‘I hope she keeps business separate from private life – but it will be hard to tell.’

Sugar intake is the ‘biggest driver for obesity’ and must be curbed, Mr Fry said.

Six in 10 adults and four in 10 children are overweight or obese, figures suggest.

Being fat can raise the risk of developing type 2 diabetes, heart disease, cancer and strokes, as well as mental health problems. It costs the NHS £6billion a year.

Professor Christina Vogel, a food policy expert at City, University London, said there is ‘certainly a need for clarity’ regarding how Ms Atkins will ‘maintain independence in food policy decisions considering her personal ties to the sugar industry’.

She told MailOnline: ‘Disclosing conflicts of interest is essential but not sufficient in understanding how policy decisions are made. 

‘We hope the incoming Health Secretary sticks to the government’s commitment to ban HFSS [foods high in fat, sugar and salt] multibuy promotions and advertising online and on television before 9pm.’

Ms Atkins, MP for Louth and Horncastle, replaces Steve Barclay, who was shunted to the environment brief.

She will now have to grapple with striking medical unions demanding more cash for NHS staff, as well as the health service’s record backlog of 7.7million patients waiting for routine treatment. A winter crisis also looms.

To ease obesity-related pressure on the NHS and get Brits fitter, ex-PM Boris Johnson announced a ‘world-leading’ obesity plan in 2020.

However, his Government shied away from the more radical proposals put forward by then food tsar and Leon founder Henry Dimbleby, such as taxes on salt and sugar.

Those proposals that did survive — a ban on buy one get one free deals and adverts before 9pm for food high in sugar, fat and salt — have since been delayed until October 2025 by Rishi Sunak.

Harriet Burt, senior policy officer at Action on Sugar, told MailOnline: ‘We look forward to seeing what positive action our new health minister will be taking on sugar reduction — especially given a unhealthy diet high in saturated fat, salt and sugar, and low in fruit and vegetables, is the biggest cause of death and disability globally and costs the UK alone more than £100billion annually.’

Barbara Crowther, from the Children’s Food Campaign, told MailOnline: ‘We welcome the new Secretary of State to her role, and addressing preventable diet-related diseases is one of several urgent challenges facing our public health services. 

‘We know from her previous work with the parliamentary group on diabetes that she already has a deep interest in this work.’

She added that the group will be ‘strongly urging her and her new ministerial team to inject new energy into the government’s obesity and public health strategies’.

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: ‘As she has done in previous ministerial roles, the Secretary of State will recuse herself on departmental issues relating to outside interests, all of which have been declared to the House and under the Ministerial Code.’

Ms Atkins, who states on her website that her husband is ‘CEO of a food company’, in 2018 voluntarily recused herself from making policy or decisions relating to cannabis while drugs minister.

It came after it emerged that Mr Kenward operated the country’s largest marijuana farm.

Until last week, he was managing director of British Sugar, which in 2017 began growing the drug at its site in Wissington, Norfolk, for use in epilepsy medicine Epidiolex. At the time, Mr Kenward said there would be enough supply to treat 40,000 children annually.

Campaign groups labelled the link a ‘conflict of interest’ and ‘hypocrisy on a grand scale’. Ms Atkins had previously declared her interest when speaking in parliament. 

Raised in a market town in Lancashire and privately educated, Ms Atkins was the first member of her family to go to university — studying law at Cambridge University.

Her father, Sir Robert Atkins, served as a Tory MP in the 1970s and 80s and later as an MEP. Her mother, Lady Dulcie Atkins, was a Tory councillor and mayor in Lancashire.

She was a criminal barrister specialising in prosecuting serious organised crime —including drug trafficking rings, gun-runners and fraudsters — before she was elected as an MP in May 2015.

Ms Atkins was appointed to the Home Office in 2017, where she was Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Crime, Safeguarding and Vulnerability, which involved work on domestic abuse, sexual exploitation and female genital mutilation.

She was appointed Minister of State at the Ministry of Justice and Minister for Afghan Resettlement in 2021. 

Ms Atkins supported Mr Sunak’s Tory leadership bid and subsequently moved to the Treasury in 2022, where she served as Financial Secretary, working alongside Chancellor Jeremy Hunt.

Ms Atkins wrote on her website that she and her husband ‘like to spend what little spare time we have going to running around after our son, Monty, building sandcastles on the beautiful Lincolnshire coastline and pulling our boots on to walk the Wolds’. 

Following her appointment as Health Secretary yesterday, she said she was ‘honoured’ to take up the role at this ‘critical time’.

Ms Atkins said: ‘Our NHS matters to us all, and I look forward to working with NHS and social care colleagues to bolster services during what promises to be a very challenging winter, cut waiting lists and improve patient care.

‘I am also determined to drive forward discussions with striking unions in order to end the ongoing industrial action which has caused so much disruption to patients.’ 

Ms Atkins has relied on the NHS herself, having been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at the age of three. 

She was vice chair of the all-party parliamentary group for diabetes, which probed how to improve standards in diabetes care.

She has previously stated that she is ‘a little cautious’ of the use of trans treatments offered to children as they are ‘so serious and life-changing’ and said youngsters could be identifying as trans ‘as an answer to questions they are perhaps not asking themselves’. 

Trans groups said the comments, made to The Telegraph, were ‘damaging’.

The Health Secretary will now have to contend with the pile of pressures on the health service.

This includes resolving the NHS strikes, which have cost £1.4billion and led to more than 1million cancellations for appointments and operations. 

The true toll is expected to be much higher, as hospitals stop booking patients in when unions confirm the dates staff will staging walkouts.

Ms Atkins is also taking the helm days after the NHS backlog spiralled to its highest level since records began in 2007.

Mr Sunak said bringing down the waiting list was one of his 2023 priorities, pledging in January that ‘lists will fall and people will get the care they need more quickly’.

However, the NHS last week told hospitals they can scale back efforts to cut waiting lists to recoup cash spent footing the bill for NHS strikes. 

Meanwhile, top doctors have warned that the crisis in A&E departments — with 44,655 waiting more than 12 hours in October — ‘chaotic’ and ‘dangerous’.

They warned the NHS is in a ‘spiral of decline’ that will see patients treated in corridors, endure long waits and suffer ‘inevitable harm’ over the winter.