Food, Diet and Obesity Committee Report

Baroness Suttie Excerpts

Friday 28th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Suttie (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate my noble friend Lady Walmsley on both her extremely powerful speech and her excellent chairing of the committee. It was a genuine pleasure to serve on that committee and to learn a lot. Anybody who knows my noble friend will know that she is both firm and fair as a chair; she also has a tremendous grasp of the detail. She has made some extremely powerful points this morning and I hope that the Minister will respond in a more encouraging way than appeared evident in the official and hugely disappointing government response to this report. I also place on record my personal thanks to the secretariat of the committee, in particular to Stuart and Lucy, who were truly exceptional.

As a child of the 1970s and a teenager of the 1980s growing up in Scotland, I grew up through a revolution in food production in this country. Growing up in the 1970s, I remember food as predominantly homemade and wholesome, if slightly bland. It was an era, as a dear friend of mine used to say, when we were blessed with “freedom from choice.” By the time I was at high school in the 1980s, industrially produced foods and ready meals were beginning to appear, along with the invention of the domestic microwave. Multinational fast-food outlets began to multiply in our cities. As a student, I clearly remember always feeling strangely dissatisfied after eating a McDonald’s burger. Although it was cheap, it always left me feeling hungry afterwards and immediately wanting another.

At that time, I was unaware that industrial research had specifically and quite deliberately produced that effect, so that customers like me consumed more. Following my time on this committee, I now understand that what I was experiencing as a student is called hyper-palatability. But whereas in the 1970s and 1980s, ultra-processed food might have been an occasional treat, nowadays, tragically, in some parts of the UK, it makes up to 80% of people’s diets.

We are all faced with an enormous choice of food outlets, from takeaways to supermarkets, Deliveroo and Uber Eats. Children, in particular, are bombarded daily by food offers and advertising encouraging them to buy and eat much more than they need. This food revolution has had a profound impact on children. They have grown up with an abundance of artificial and industrially produced foods, and some have little or no experience of natural or home-cooked food.

The statistics are stark and becoming worse. In the UK, over 20% of children are already too heavy and around 10% are already obese when they start primary school. As the Food Foundation’s most recent report states, children in the most deprived fifth of the population are over twice as likely to be living with obesity as those in the least deprived fifth by their first year of school. A few weeks ago, on a four-hour train journey back from Scotland, I watched as a mother fed her toddler three little plastic sachets of fruit puree. Misleadingly, these fruit sachets are marketed as a health product. The mother no doubt thought that she was giving her child a healthy option, but just one of those sachets contains the recommended daily allowance of sugar for an adult. It is surely wrong that our shops can sell baby foods and drinks that are packed full of sugar but have no traffic light warning or label on them.

The same applies to so-called follow-on and growing-up milk. For example, a one or two year-old consuming Alpro soya growing-up milk—which states on the pack that it is low in sugars—would typically be consuming over three times the recommended maximum total daily sugars intake from that product alone. Does the Minister not agree that warning labels about sugar content on children’s food products are urgently needed? The noble Baroness, Lady Brown of Silvertown, made the case so very powerfully that provision of a healthy school meal in early years can have an extremely positive impact on behaviour and concentration in class. It can also encourage healthy eating and good nutrition habits at a young age.

A healthy and nutritious hot meal is nearly always going to be healthier than a packed-lunch option, which is often full of ultra-processed products. A friend’s nine year-old daughter, Livia, recently told me that she was deeply concerned by what her schoolmates were eating on a daily basis. During the public hearings for this committee, we heard the experiences of many young people; they really do care about these issues. There have been rumours surrounding cuts in the provision of school meals. I would be grateful if the Minister could clarify the Government’s plan regarding school meals.

The Government’s response, or lack of response, to the very concrete and constructive suggestions on children, young people, infants and school meals in chapters 6 and 7 of this report are deeply disappointing. Investing in a healthy start for our children makes sound economic sense, as other noble Lords have said. Robert Boyle, a paediatrician from Imperial College, says that obesity is the greatest health crisis on the planet and that it often starts with childhood. We need to take firm action now.

Abortion

Baroness Suttie Excerpts

Wednesday 6th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

The position of the Government is that this ought to be a decision for the elected representatives of Northern Ireland representing the people of Northern Ireland, which is why we are determined to restore power-sharing agreements and arrangements as soon as possible—so they can make that decision.

[Baroness Suttie (LD)]

If the Supreme Court rules tomorrow that Northern Ireland’s abortion laws are in contravention of human rights laws, will the Minister confirm that the Government will move to repeal sections of the 1861 Act and decriminalise abortion in Northern Ireland?

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

As my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland set out in her statement yesterday in the debate, we are aware of the decision coming imminently tomorrow and that both we and the Northern Ireland Executive will consider that judgment carefully.

Antimicrobial Resistance

Baroness Suttie Excerpts

Thursday 8th March 2018 Grand Committee

[Baroness Suttie (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, for securing this extremely important and timely debate. I begin by declaring an interest as vice-chair of the APPG on Global Tuberculosis, and I refer noble Lords to my interests as set out in the register and my work with the Global TB Caucus. I will, perhaps not surprisingly, concentrate my remarks this afternoon on tuberculosis and multidrug-resistant TB.

The review on AMR by the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, estimated that one-third of all AMR-associated deaths are currently caused by drug-resistant TB. In 2016, an estimated 600,000 people developed drug-resistant TB. While rates are going down gradually, drug-resistant TB rates continue to rise in some parts of the world. This situation is particularly true in Europe, which has seen the fastest growing rates of multidrug-resistant TB of any world region. Although it has the lowest TB incidence, it has the highest rates of MDR TB. Of the almost 300,000 cases of TB in Europe last year, more than 120,000 were drug-resistant. I should say at this point that this is the European region as defined by the World Health Organization, which includes the central Asian countries of the former Soviet Union. In other words, well over one-third of all TB cases in Europe last year were drug-resistant.

Of the 30 countries identified as having the highest rates of drug-resistant TB, nine are in the European region and the countries of the former Soviet Union. The reasons for the particularly high levels of TB and MDR TB in the countries of the former Soviet Union are complex: steep economic decline and the sharp rise in poverty in the 1990s, when the Soviet Union collapsed; the disintegration of the Soviet healthcare system; an HIV epidemic; very high prison populations and dilapidated prison facilities; and the excessive hospitalisation of patients who are no longer infectious as they have been taking their medication. In addition, since independence, many of these countries have seen significant deregulation of pharmaceutical provision and the ready availability of antibiotics to buy in privatised kiosks, often without a doctor’s prescription, throughout the cities of the former Soviet Union. In some countries, there are also difficulties in securing newer drugs available to treat MDR TB, from which patients could greatly benefit.

With the Global TB Caucus I have been visiting many of these countries over the past 18 months to try to raise awareness of multidrug-resistant TB and its causes among parliamentarians in the countries of the former Soviet Union, to encourage them to set up parliamentary groups like APPGs in their own Parliaments and to work with civil society organisations and their health ministries to take action against drug-resistant forms of TB. Clearly, the APPG in this department has very similar aims.

The noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, in his review of AMR, recommended as a first intervention that there should be a global public awareness campaign. Will the Minister say how successful he thinks this public awareness campaign has been up until now, and what further measures the Government intend to take to achieve this goal? Drug-resistant strains of TB are more expensive to treat because of the cost of medicines, the length of treatment and the amount of additional support required by each patient to manage side effects. I have spoken to many patients with drug-resistant TB in Ukraine and central Asian countries, as well as here in the UK, and they have told me of the difficulties of swallowing up to 20 pills a day, along with painful injections and the side effects to their mental and physical health of having to cope with such a harsh regimen, often for a period of 18 months or more. Considerable support networks are required to ensure that patients continue with their treatment and, clearly, not continuing with the treatment adds to the risk of developing a form of TB which is even more drug-resistant.

There have been relatively few advances in finding new treatments which work more effectively and more quickly against drug-resistant TB, which leads me to my second question to the Minister. What measures do the Government intend to take to incentivise the production of new and more effective antibiotics for TB, and multidrug-resistant TB in particular? The Global TB Caucus estimates that $1 trillion will be lost to the global economy between 2015 and 2030 if no major steps are taken. Increases in rates of MDR TB can put a massive strain on healthcare systems and national economies. KPMG predicts that Europe could be due to lose nearly 0.02% of its economy between 2015 and 2050 due to MDR TB alone should urgent action not be taken.

In autumn this year the United Nations will hold a high-level meeting on TB. This represents a significant opportunity to adopt a concerted international effort to tackle multidrug-resistant TB. Will the Minister say what preparations the Government are currently making to prepare for this high-level meeting?

I will end with a quote from the review by the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill:

“The burden of TB is too great, and the need for new treatments too urgent, for it not to be a central consideration in the role and objectives of a global intervention to support antibiotic development”.