In 2006, the UK's Health and Safety Executive carried out what it termed a ‘sensible risk debate’ as a direct response to growing public fears that government intervention in private decision making had reached excessive and, in many cases, simply untenable levels. Action had been catalysed by then-Prime Minister Tony Blair's 2005 speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research in which he set out the UK's commitment to placing the theme of better regulation at the heart of its 2005 European Union presidency term. Stating categorically that ‘we cannot eliminate risk, we have to live with it, manage it’, Blair also acknowledged that within public service, ‘the idea that it is the job of government to eliminate risk can lead to the elimination of common sense’. In a language that seamlessly combined the work of liberal governmentality theorists (Valverde 1998: 7; Dean 2007) and the concern with ‘self-efficacy’ by cognitive psychologists of public health (Bandura 2004); the ensuing debate aimed to determine where the ‘sensible balance’ lay between ensuring public protection and guaranteeing personal freedom and autonomy (Nuffield Council on Bioethics 2007). When set against a backdrop of what has been branded an emergent ‘risk culture’ of a ‘kind of perpetual uncertainty’ (Dean 2007: 66), such keen government interest in the appropriate management of those ‘fine-grained risks and the balance of probability’ (Blair 2005) has opened up space for a consideration of what it might mean to be ‘sensible’ in the face of new and emergent risks, especially those linked to the contested and under-explored realms of consumption and behavioural choices expressly linked to (healthy) lifestyles. This is the chief concern of this book.

The demise of Blairite politics in 2010 and the ascension of the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition have done little to dampen this debate in the UK. The 2010 White Paper Healthy Lives, Healthy People reiterated this governance tension: