Food, Diet and Obesity Committee Report

Baroness Batters Excerpts

Friday 28th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Batters (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, for her leadership on all this and the expert committee which has worked and supported her. I agree with so much of what has been said today, and I am conscious that, with time running short, I do not want to repeat that.

I want to focus a bit more on carrot and not just stick. I, too, pay tribute to Sharon Hodgson, who has many times been a one-woman campaigner on school food. We have had others: Jamie Oliver has done a huge amount, and the school food plan has achieved a huge amount, but we must not give up on creating a love of food and cooking from scratch.

When I hear a lot about our broken food system, I would say it is very much our choices that are broken rather than just the food system. All roads lead back to education and opportunity. I look at countries such as Finland and what it has achieved: it has been recently reported yet again to be the happiest country in the world and has had the longest period of free school meals of any country in the world since 1948. Much has been said about France but also Japan—another of the healthiest countries on Earth, with food much more expensive than it is here. There, I think, lies some of the challenge around the culture of our food.

We remain slightly lost, whether we are European or American—and we have inherited the worst of both in many cases. It will be education, in many ways, that drives us back to a love of food and to cooking from scratch, and it will need carrot and stick to achieve it. We have had a long-term cheap food policy that has crossed all political parties. At what price have we had that policy? We have the most affordable food in Europe and the third most affordable food per income spend of any country in the world. It is also worth noting that we waste more food than any other country in Europe, which tells us very clearly that we are not learning to value our food.

So I put two questions to the Minister. We have had a long-term, cross-party focus on the importance of STEM learning. Is it not time that food, diet and fitness, which have been key to Finland’s and Japan’s success, were treated in the same way in our curriculum as STEM? I am also interested to know: how will the government food board join up across departments? For my entire time at the NFU, I failed to get into the Department for Education. If we are to have success here, we must have a food board that is truly joined up and is not competitive within government departments. That, I fear, is what could happen.