Government Food Strategy

Debate between Lord Benyon and Baroness Finlay of Llandaff

Monday 13th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I am very grateful to the noble Baroness for her support, but I understand that that support is conditional on it being a good land use strategy that reflects the wider uses of land in a property-owning democracy, which is what we are. You cannot order farmers and land managers to use their land a certain way. You can regulate them in certain ways and you can control them through the planning system but, most of all, you can incentivise them.

It is not only the Government who are doing that. I was talking to a dairy farmer the other day who told me that he was way ahead of the Government in getting to net zero, not because the Government were telling him to do it, but because to continue to sell his milk to a particular buyer he had to get to net zero. That made him make land use decisions that were in the public good. There is a lot happening, but it does need pulling together in a clear, coherent strategy and I hope, working with people on all sides of this House, we will get a land use strategy that will be fit for the decades to come as we tackle the huge challenges we face.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

My Lords, this strategy has chapters on levelling up and trends in diet and obesity. However—here I declare my role as chair of the Commission on Alcohol Harm—it says absolutely nothing about alcohol. Yet alcohol is highly obesogenic; one glass of wine is equivalent to two Jaffa cakes. When we look at levelling up, we know that there is a much higher rate of alcohol-related mortality in the north-east of England. It is more than 20% higher than in the south-east of England. Alcohol is associated with 45% of all violent crime and 39% of domestic violence. Every day there are about 80 alcohol-related deaths and every year there are about 6,000 alcohol-specific deaths. Given the high source of calories in alcohol products across the board, why has alcohol been completely omitted from a strategy that talks about obesity and levelling up, when it is a cause of levelling down and ongoing obesity?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The noble Baroness eloquently identifies a very serious societal problem, but to say that the Government are not addressing it because it is not specifically mentioned is not the case. The Department of Health and Social Care, working with other departments, has a very clear view about how we can help reduce the problem she identifies. She is right to say that it affects more challenged communities much worse than others. We are working across government and working with local government, education and in a variety of other different ways to tackle it. We will always be open to her expertise and knowledge in trying to make sure that those are felt right across government.