What's wrong with charging a fat tax?

Spectator

3 days ago

At a time when quarterly economic growth in the UK is flatlining at 0.3 per cent, it's good to learn that not every industry in Britain is in mortal peril. While their customers have seen better days, coffin makers report that the average casket width has grown from 18-20 inches to a girthy 20-24 inches.
As a 15.8 per cent increase, it's the definition of an upsell and the kind of growth that only countries that have fired their chief statistician can hope to achieve. You'd think it would be a boom time for the National Association of Funeral Directors, who, given their trade, must rarely be in the mood for celebrating.
Yet it seems that both the bereaved and those doing the boxing and burying are alarmed by the corpulence of the corpses. With coffins growing ever wider, prospective punters at Danescourt Cemetery in Wolverhampton were dismayed to learn this week that new 6ft-wide gravesites had been earmarked for a £450 surcharge over standard 5ft ones, a 20 per cent levy totalling £2,700.
Local councillors were criticised for the move, which followed a May decision to create a new cemetery section for the big-boned. While the City of Wolverhampton Council has justified it as a response to increased demand for those larger sites, opponents lambasted it as a 'fat tax'.
Predictably for a Labour administration, the council appears to have backed down on sustainable financing for the two-tier tombstones, with a spokesperson saying it would 'not proceed with the plans'. Councillors were no doubt spooked by the dread accusation of 'discrimination'.
But then, why shouldn't cemeteries discriminate? Those with more to love are literally depriving those also dearly departed of graveyard space, which in many parts of the country is competitive despite ailing church attendance. As Matthew Crawley, chief executive at the Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management, put it, the so-called 'fat tax' might equally be termed 'a concessionary fee for appropriate land usage'.
Should the funeral business die down, Crawley might consider a career in the Whitehall diplomatic corp. To be more blunt, and at the risk of speaking ill of the dead, while rotundity is eminently defensible as a lifestyle choice, it's also frequently a burden on others and exactly the kind of negative externality that economists justifiably love to tax.
The matter is not even one confined to mortality. It is surely a greater nightmare to the living that, when you embark on a long-haul flight, fellow travellers literally overflow from nearby seats, with complaints about this phenomenon swelling across the West in line with people's waistlines.
While some airlines have asked the big-bodied to pay more, in Australia two years ago advocates for 'guests of size' invoked discrimination law against policies that meant girthier customers needed to stump up for two seats. The Obesity Collective's director Tiffany Petre claimed it was unclear who qualified as too fat to fly, though being unable to squeeze both arse cheeks into one seat is usually a good sign.
Online influencers frequently echo the claim that chunky monkeys shouldn't be charged more, bringing inevitable claims of 'bullying' and 'fat shaming'. The American influencer Jaelynn Chaney called it 'outrageous' that people are 'forced to pay twice for the same accommodation anyone else gets with just one ticket'. Naturally, Canada has already made the double-charge illegal so long as you can provide a doctor's note.
That leads us to the fraught area of whether fatness should incur higher costs in healthcare. Private health insurers generally charge higher premiums, and the government has shown an increasing desire to tax junk food or exempt it from promotions. By contrast, no politician would dare suggest that the stocky citizen should pay more taxes while placing a greater burden on our NHS.
It's a debate that inevitably comes down to whether you think obesity is a lifestyle choice or a curse imposed by genetic misfortune, a McDonald's on every street corner, and Sainsbury's generous promotions on cheese. When combined with the NHS's miserly distribution of Ozempic and similar drugs for weight loss, there's no shortage of excuses for love handles.
And to be fair to advocates for the overweight, some of us are playing the game on easy mode, blessed with more self-control, more money for the low-cal Waitrose shop, and perhaps even a private doctor for that Ozempic prescription. But ultimately such excuse-making can't nullify the physics: if you are fat, it's because you ate too much.
Offsetting the downsides of your dietary choices through higher costs is no different than surcharging smokers for every pack of cigarettes, or slapping alcohol duty on a bottle of wine. While it's down to local councils how they manage their cemeteries, caving to campaigners over spurious claims of unjust discrimination is a grave mistake.