Health and Care Bill

Debate between Baroness Finlay of Llandaff and Lord Shipley

Lords Hansard _ Part 1 & Report stage
Wednesday 16th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

My Lords, we now come to an amendment on alcohol, and I declare that I chair the Commission on Alcohol Harm. This amendment is designed to get the Government to produce a report on labelling, which is long overdue. Some people in this Chamber have been asking for it for 20 years or so, and nobody can quite understand the delay.

My amendment looks at the feasibility of putting information on labels about the harms and calorie content, and it runs completely in line with the Government’s strategy on trying to do something about obesity across the nation. I know that some people in the alcohol industry have suggested that they would like to put a QR code on, but it seems almost impossible to imagine people going with their mobile phones along a supermarket shelf looking at all these QR codes. If they can put some printing on the QR code, they could put on some printing with proper health information, harms information and calorie information in a way that one can read it in a reasonably sized font.

Alcohol is the leading cause of death and ill-health among 15 to 49 year-olds. It is linked to more than 200 health conditions. Alcohol is highly calorific: two glasses of wine can contain almost the entire daily recommended sugar limit. If you have two glasses of some wines, you will have a calorific intake that is the same as that of a big burger. This is not small numbers of calories.

Currently, the only legal requirements on alcohol labels are alcohol by volume, the volume itself and the common allergens that may be present. This does not match up with other food and drink. Alcohol labels do not list ingredients, calories or other information such as health impacts. There is more information on a bottle of orange juice or a carton of milk than there is on a bottle of wine.

The Government have committed money for the drugs strategy. That is most welcome, but I hope it will not all get diverted into drugs of addiction and that it will actually be used to support alcohol treatment services. We know that, in the last few years, only about one in five dependent drinkers have been able to access treatment services for their alcohol addiction.

The problem for consumers when they start out is that they do not know what they are consuming. They do not realise how calorie-laden the drinks are, and they cannot make informed choices about their health. Nor can they make informed choices about the dangers they pose to others, which includes other people with whom they interact when they are intoxicated as well as the dangers in driving.

Voluntary labelling has failed. We have seen again and again that consumers will not get the information they need on alcohol labels unless it is required in legislation. Seven in 10 people think that the warning should be displayed on alcohol labels as a legal requirement. Even the symbol not to drink in pregnancy is so tiny that it is not getting the message across, and foetal alcohol syndrome featured on the “Today” programme just this morning.

I remind the House that we took forward the Domestic Abuse Act, and one in five people are harmed by other people’s drinking.

As for driving, the road death figures show that problem drinkers are responsible for many of the 2,000 seriously injured or killed each year in alcohol-related crashes. The long-awaited consultation on labelling must also look at lowering the blood alcohol limit to 50 milligrams per 100 millilitres of blood, with its potential to reduce fatal alcohol-related crashes by 11%. There is good evidence that those with blood levels between 50 and 80 milligrams per 100 millilitres are six times more likely to be involved in a fatal accident than people who are alcohol free.

The Government’s intention to consult on including more information on alcohol labels is welcome if it is realised, but we have been waiting almost two years for the announced consultation to be launched. During this time, alcohol harm has increased, and deaths from alcohol reached record highs in 2020. Can the Minister tell us when the consultation’s report will be formulated and when it will appear? We cannot leave this unattended to, with consumers not knowing what they are taking whenever they take a drink. I beg to move.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, in moving this amendment, the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff, has emphasised its importance to improving personal and public health. The amendment requires the Secretary of State to publish a report on alcohol labelling, with the aim of improving consumer knowledge about the contents and potential harms of alcohol products. Surely it is in the interests of consumers for labelling on alcoholic products to meet the standards we have come to expect from food labelling.

The context really matters. As the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, said, alcohol is the leading risk factor contributing to ill health and death for 15 to 49 year-olds, and it is the fifth leading factor across all age groups. Drinking a bottle of wine is, for example, the equivalent of smoking 10 cigarettes, yet a packet of cigarettes must carry a health warning. Surely consumers should be entitled to know how many units of alcohol, how many calories and how much sugar is in a bottle or can. It is very clear that the alcohol industry’s self-regulation has failed, as the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, said. Commitments were made a decade ago that labelling would improve in line with Department of Health recommendations, yet that has not happened.

Health and Social Care Bill

Debate between Baroness Finlay of Llandaff and Lord Shipley

Thursday 8th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendments 238AA, 238AB, 238BZA and 238BA and to declare my interest as a member of Newcastle City Council.

These amendments relate to the membership of health and well-being boards. As currently proposed, the boards will have at least one councillor of the relevant local authority—so it could be one councillor, or it could be more. The choice will be with the council. However, several other people who have membership will be officers or unelected co-optees. This means that the board as currently proposed is effectively a board of directors, not a council committee which—unlike all other council committees—is made up of those who are publicly elected. Yet the board as proposed is legally a council committee; and because it is legally a council committee, only councillors can vote—officers must advise. For officers to vote, specific regulations will have to be put in place, and of course they can be. However, I hope that the Minister is willing to think further about this. Councillors, being elected, have both a democratic mandate—unlike officers—and a perception of service provision which comes from a geographical perspective as well as a service perspective. At times that can be very valuable, particularly in a geographically large council area.

To have just one councillor—which is what the Bill permits—would be a mistake. It would mean a council committee, the health and well-being board, would be dominated by officers and co-optees. It would also mean that only one political group was in membership of the board, which in my view would be deeply unwise.

Given the board’s terms of reference, I do not argue that councillors have to be in majority. However, I do argue that councillors are important; that geographical differences in a council area should be acknowledged; and that more than one political group should be fully represented on a board. Amendment 238AA solves this problem. It defines the minimum number of councillors as three. That would give the board greater breadth and enable political proportionality to be effective. Amendment 238AB states that where a council is a county council and part of a two-tier system of local government, there should be a district council representative as well as county representatives because district councils have statutory duties in relation to health and well-being. Having one district councillor appointed in this way as a representative of several district councils is normal procedure for those councils when duties span the two tiers. The other two amendments are simply enabling amendments assuming that Amendments 238AA and 238AB are agreed.

In Committee there was a discussion about councillor membership—how many there should be, whether they should be in a majority and whether they should have powers over the budgets of other health organisations not managed by the council. There was no conclusion to that debate, but I have thought long and hard about it. I have concluded that the amendments in my name and those of the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Eaton and Lady Henig, which reflect all parts of this Chamber, give a solution to this problem and would enable us to balance professional knowledge with the necessary democratic accountability.

I do not propose to press this to a vote, but I hope that the Minister will be willing to engage in discussion on it. What is being proposed from all parts of the House is a solution to a problem that needs to be resolved. It will prevent difficulties arising further down the line should a council decide to have only one councillor as a member of the board.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff]

My Lords, I shall speak briefly to Amendment 238A, which is in the name of my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham. I rather hope that the Government will take on board its spirit, if not its actual wording. The reason is that in creating a joint strategic needs assessment, there will be a requirement for those involved to begin to work in a completely new way. Human nature is such that people tend to repeat the patterns of things they have done before. In addition, they do not know what they do not know. When they feel insecure, they are less—not more—likely to consult, because it is quite threatening to have to consult and go beyond the boundaries of what you thought you knew and discover all the things that you did not know.

The beauty of the amendment is that it creates an obligation to,

“consult relevant health professionals and any other”

person, without specifying who they are. It leaves it very broad but it pushes forward the boundaries. We have already discussed the problem of children. The difficulty, if people do not consult widely, is that if children miss out at a developmental stage and one aspect of their development—for example, motor development, speech and language development or emotional development—does not occur, they never catch up. It is missed out for good; they always lag behind.

It is really important to make sure that the provisions are there right the way through the trajectory from birth onwards to make sure that the needs of children as they develop are met, that deficits are identified early and that interventions take place immediately.

Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Debate between Baroness Finlay of Llandaff and Lord Shipley

Thursday 9th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff]

My Lords, I apologise to the Committee. I was part of the discussions, but I did not double-check that everybody knew. I apologise to the Benches opposite.

[Lord Shipley]

I shall speak first to Amendment 237A. It is an extremely important amendment because it defines not just the responsibility of a local council—here I declare an interest as a member of Newcastle City Council and as chair of the regional advisory group for public health in the north-east of England. The amendment builds in to the general duty of a licensing authority, which has a quasi-judicial role, the responsibility to protect and, crucially, to improve public health. Through other legislation, local authorities are being given enhanced responsibilities for public health. The responsibilities relate to a range of things around smoking, obesity, road safety and so on, but given some of the evidence we have heard this afternoon, not least the fact that the latest figures seem to show that at the weekends 50 per cent of hospital admissions are alcohol related, the cost to the National Health Service and the economy is very great, and the responsibility for addressing that problem has to lie with some democratic structure. In general terms, it lies with the local authority but critically, because a licensing authority is quasi-judicial, it is important to have a general duty applying to that licensing authority to protect and improve public health. I think this very clear statement will make a difference in the way in which licensing authorities operate in future.

I referred to regional advisory groups on public health. One of the consequences of the abolition of government offices in England is that a range of regional structures are no longer in existence or are about to go out of existence. One of the things we are having to address at the moment is how issues of public health can be discussed and how research evaluation and good practice can be spread in a context bigger than a single local authority.

I hope that the Government might look at ways in which we can develop this general duty to protect and improve public health so that local authorities are required to work together more closely on that agenda. Reducing the consumption of alcohol, reducing the incidence of smoking, improving road safety figures and so on all apply to more than just one local authority in a given part of the country. However, this is a very important amendment and its impact should not be underestimated.