Restricting promotions of food and drink high in fat, sugar, or salt: consultation analysis

2. About the respondents and responses

Number of responses received

2.1. The consultation received 110 responses, 72 from organisations (65%) and 38 from individuals (35%), all of which were included for analysis.

2.2. Respondents could submit an online response by completing the response form hosted on the Scottish Government's consultation hub, Citizen Space. In total 54 respondents used this facility to submit their response.

2.3. Respondents could also submit their responses directly to the Scottish Government's Diet and Healthy Weight Team by email. 56 respondents (52 organisations and 4 individuals) submitted their response by this route.

Organisation respondents

2.4. A list of the organisations that responded to the consultation is provided in Annex 2. For the purposes of the analysis, the organisations were grouped in to two categories – industry (n=41; 57%) and non-industry (n=31; 43%). The composition of these categories is shown in Table 2.1.

2.5. In general, industry respondents were less likely than non-industry organisations to specify an overall viewpoint (i.e. give a tick box answer). There were occurrences where industry respondents that had not selected a tick box did not favour a particular answer option on its own merit or generally disagreed with the proposals to introduce restrictions, but indicated a preference that if restrictions are implemented a particular course of action should be taken. Where this equated to one of the tick box options, efforts have been made to describe qualitatively where these views may increase the overall level of support for a specific answer option.

Individual respondents

2.6. It was not always clear what interest or knowledge was held by individual respondents. Overall, the number of individual respondents was low and therefore caution should be used when interpreting the percentages that held a specific view to the multiple choice (closed) questions.

Responses to individual questions

2.7. Not all respondents answered all the questions in the consultation questionnaire and, at times, the responses to a given question related to other questions or to a related topic not directly covered by the consultation. Respondents that answered via citizen space were likely to provide a tick box answer to the questions, whereas responses submitted by email varied in respect of how closely they followed the consultation question and answer structure. Often respondents that did not provide a multiple-choice (tick box) response or selected 'don't know' did not provide a comment on that issue. Where they did, these have been integrated at the most relevant point.

2.8. The final question provided the opportunity to outline any other comments. Responses to this question varied greatly and have been integrated into relevant sections of the findings.