Just clocked that Will Cavendish, the director of health and wellbeing at the Department of Health and the architect behind the Change4Life programme, is on his way to the Department for Energy & Climate Change.
He is taking on the brief of director-general. Not entirely sure what this entails but marketers should think about getting on his good side. During his tenure at DH he oversaw the push to tone down tobacco displays, traffic-light labelling (which the food industry mostly hates) and seems to have strong-armed the booze industry into launching its joint responsible drinking marketing push, The Campaign for Smarter Drinking.
One of my contacts describes him as a ‘strong supporter of effective self-regulation who appreciates the importance of social marketing’. It will be interesting to see how this manifests itself in his new role.
