Response to Petticrew and colleagues.
We thank Petticrew and colleagues for their letter in response to our article [1]. They are the team of academic researchers that has been funded to undertake an evaluation of the Responsibility Deal (RD). Their points of clarification re the funding of their research and its current focus are welcome. However, we would have been interested to learn whether the findings in our paper will influence their research as we feel this might impact on the direction of their research evaluation. The focus of our research was the calorie reduction pledge of the RD, and particularly its working practices. We were only examining this one aspect of the initiative and we recognise that the research brief of Petticrew et al. is much wider. However, our findings exposed serious flaws in both the process and the lack of outcome measures. To reiterate the key points in our paper: