By Holly Williams
November 29, 2025 / CBS News
London — The U.K. government is broadening its sugary drinks levy to cover a range of milk-based beverages, including milkshakes, flavored milks, sweetened yogurt drinks, chocolate milk and certain coffees, the Department of Health and Social Care announced this week. Producers and importers will have until January 2028 to meet the new rules.
Public health campaigners say the move aims to further reduce children’s sugar intake. Nutritionist Dr. Kawther Hashem, an advocate for the original levy, noted sugary drinks are a major contributor to childhood hospital admissions and that soft drinks were an obvious place to begin tackling the problem.
The levy, introduced in 2018, originally applied to sugary soft drinks and charged producers and importers as much as about 30 cents per liter for high-sugar products, based on sugar per 100 milliliters. That approach encouraged many manufacturers to reformulate products to avoid the charge rather than simply passing costs to consumers; in practice, reformulations often replaced sugar with low- or no-calorie sweeteners so products retained a similar taste while containing much less sugar.
Under the expansion, the tax will remain targeted at producers and importers — a design that previously spurred manufacturers to halve sugar levels in popular drinks. The government will also lower the sugar threshold for the newly covered milk-based categories from 5 grams per 100 milliliters to 4.5 grams per 100 milliliters, tightening the rule for those products.
Research from the University of Cambridge estimated in 2023 that the original sugary drinks tax may have prevented more than 5,000 cases of obesity annually among 10- and 11-year-old girls. Officials expect the extension to prompt similar reformulation and public health gains.
American mother Jules Dunlop, who lives in the British countryside, said she finds everyday U.K. products generally lower in sugar than equivalent items she remembers from the United States. She said her family has experienced more energy and clearer skin after cutting sugar and that, in many cases, she cannot tell the difference in taste between U.K. and U.S. versions of the same drink.
Some U.S. cities have their own sugar taxes, but without a national policy manufacturers are less likely to change product recipes across the country. U.K. officials say the expanded levy is intended to build on the original policy’s success by targeting additional categories that contribute significantly to children’s sugar consumption.