Food, Diet and Obesity Committee Report

Lord Bethell Excerpts

Friday 28th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great honour to follow my noble friend Lady Jenkin who has been talking on these issues way before it became so fashionable and drew me into this debate in the first place. I would like to say thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, and all those who sat on this committee, who have done an incredible job and made a very persuasive case. I also draw attention to my role as adviser to Oviva, a company that provides treatment to those with obesity, and the role of my wife, who is a non-executive director of Tesco, the British retailer.

Others have spoken about the impact of obesity on our health, including the noble Baroness, Lady Browning, the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, and my noble friend Lady Meyer. As a moment of personal testimony, I saw how we, as a country, suffered during the pandemic because 64% of adults were carrying too much weight and their bodies were weakened and could not fight the virus properly. The ONS study on obesity and mortality found emphatic evidence that the risk of death from coronavirus was double for those who had obesity. That is true in other realms of health and it is an observation that plays out in every hospital, every GP surgery and every morgue in the country, every day of the week.

Others, including the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, and my noble friend Lord Caithness have talked about how all this damages our economy. The evidence is absolutely overwhelming; I will not go over it all, but I will mention the correspondence I had with the OBR—emphatic and clear arbiters of our future financial security. It wrote that the rising tide of chronic health conditions linked to obesity is increasing the years that people spend in ill-health, and that is having a material impact on our ability to sustain the national debt. The Army cannot recruit fit soldiers; our businesses cannot find a fit workforce; and our communities are struggling to cope with obesity-related poor health—we simply cannot go on like this.

The response from the Government is particularly disappointing given that the political mood on this issue has completely changed. Polling evidence overwhelmingly points to strong support for government interventions. National newspapers have become health conscious, campaigning on issues such as fast food outlets near schools. Major civic organisations like children’s charities and the health champions are clamouring for action. Directors for public health, local authority chiefs and NHS chiefs published compelling evidence of harm, thoughtful recommendations for change and alarm about the cost of exciting but expensive obesity treatments. Countries such as Norway, Portugal, Mexico, Canada and Chile are leading the way by clamping down on junk food advertising and, most strikingly, in America, the popular End Chronic Disease movement has expressed popular anger towards the junk food industry. That was seen in the influence of Robert Kennedy on the presidential election. His appointment at Secretary of State for Health, while quite a strange event in world history, has shown how popular anger about our declining health is boiling over into the mainstream.

We have reached a point where the junk food industry can no longer be regarded as a constructive contributor to our national interest, or a benign employer of our people, or a supplier of nutritious sustenance to feed our people. Companies such as Nestlé, Mondelēz, Coca-Cola, Mars, Ferrero and others are making billions of pounds of profits. Their CEOs make tens of millions of pounds each year. Meanwhile, our children face a life of poor health and addiction; the NHS is running nearly 100 child obesity clinics, at great expense; and the UK workforce is quitting employment because of the cardiovascular, MSK and consequential mental health problems associated with obesity. The junk food giants should be regarded as a leech on our public finances; free riders that are not paying for the externalities that they create; and a threat to both our national security and our public finances. That is why the Government’s response is so disappointing. It calls for “co-ordination and collaboration”, which they say is essential. I just do not agree.

We need hard, regulatory guard-rails. We need to put health promotion at the centre of the Food Standards Agency priorities. We need fiscal intervention, starting with the sugar tax. We need a monopoly investigation by the CMA. We need to start taking the junk food industry out of the conversation, as we have done with the tobacco industry and should do with the pornography industry. The points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, on that really resonated.

If we have learned anything, it is that the micro-intervention approach does not work. It did not work with tobacco, despite what the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, said. Some 80 years after it was proven that cigarettes kill, 13% of the country still smokes. The micro-intervention approach does not work for businesses, which have a fiduciary obligation to maximise profits. As a result, they waste huge amounts of shareholder value and creative energy battling fines and red tape. It is not working for our NHS, our economy or our national security. Instead, we need a clear and emphatic approach that protects the consumer and allows the industry to survive. Collaboration with today’s junk food industry just will not get us there.

Health: Quad-demic

Lord Bethell Excerpts

Tuesday 10th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Merron (Lab)]

I listened carefully to the noble Lord. The JCVI considered that there was less certainty about how well the RSV vaccine works in people aged 80 and over when the programme was introduced in 2023, and that is because, as the noble Lord said, there were insufficient people aged 80 and older in the clinical trials. The JCVI continues to keep this under review, including looking at data from clinical trials and evidence in other countries, and there will shortly be an update to your Lordships’ House in respect of research and clinical trials.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

The Minister says that we are determined to learn the lessons of Covid. During Covid we had vaccination rates of 90% but, as she said, only 16 million—just 25%—of our citizens have had the flu jab and vaccination rates among children are also deteriorating at a rate. I say this with some personal interest because there was an outbreak of the quad-demic in my own household at 2 am today. There are three times as many people in hospital today with flu than in this week last year. Can the Minister please explain what she is doing to increase vaccination rates, particularly among children?

Vaping Products: Usage by Children

Lord Bethell Excerpts

Monday 2nd September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

The noble Lord, Lord Winston, may be right that vaping has been around for longer than we think, but the current boom came out of a deliberate exercise by two academics at Stanford University, Adam Bowen and James Monsees, in 2005, to find a medical technology that would give people a route out of smoking which would give them the same social interaction—the smoking, the fiddling and the what have you. They deliberately sought to find a device that would help people give up smoking. In this endeavour they succeeded fantastically well. The business that span out of their work in Stanford became Juul, the big success story in the American vape industry, sold in 2017 for billions. In that respect, it is a wonderful success story of how medical technology can be used to crack one of the big, difficult knots in our medical challenges.

We should be honest with ourselves. In the UK, smoking cessation has completely stalled. There are still 50 million cigarettes smoked every day by around 15% of the country. There is no way that we will hit the 2030 smoke-free objective that we have set for ourselves on the current trajectory. In some demographics—the poorer demographics—we will not get there until 2050, if at all.

Vapes are a really promising opportunity—a way out. This is innovation at its best. However, vapes also present us with a classic but horrible public health dilemma: in seeking to forestall one deadly epidemic, we might accidentally be creating another one. Clearly, the vape companies, now largely owned by the tobacco companies, are targeting children. My noble friend Lord Storey put it really well. The statistics are plain. They have created a £1.5 billion nicotine addiction industry here in the UK, which is mostly made up of young people who have never smoked and never intended to smoke. I find that extremely uncomfortable.

As noble Lords have pointed out, current regulation is completely failing to prevent young people taking up vaping. I say this with due consideration of and respect for the efforts of those concerned, but the truth is that trading standards officers, HMRC inspectors, MHRA officials and local authorities are tripping over each other to try to find a way to control this. But the business moves more quickly than regulators can adapt, and, frankly, it is a bit of a mess. I have little hope that the various piecemeal ideas that are being proffered will be an effective answer.

This state of confusion is compounded, as the noble Lord, Lord Winston, quite rightly pointed out, by the ambiguity around the long-term health implications of vaping. I am a lay person, not a clinician, but I think I would be right to summarise by saying that although there is not conclusive evidence today that vaping is bad for you, there is enough on the books to make us worry that there is a fair chance of significant consequences sometime in the future.

What we end up with is a debate around whether we should have flavours, but we should be honest: the debate around flavours is a bit of a legislative displacement exercise. Flavours are intrinsic to the attraction of vapes, both to adults and to children, but the real dilemma facing us as legislators is how comfortable we feel about this industry growing in size. Are we comfortable with the number of vapers in the UK rising from 5% of the country to 15% or 25%? Are we comfortable with the industry being worth £3 billion or £5 billion, or maybe more? Are we comfortable with it attracting largely a poorer consumer group, for vapes to be used largely by young people and children, and for it to store up a potentially massive healthcare liability for the future? Those are the key questions. Or are we so worried that our smoking cessation tool may become a backdoor for another nicotine addiction sector that has dangerous health effects that cost our society another fortune, just like the tobacco industry did, that we should close the whole thing down, as many other countries have done or are trying to do? Is there a way of using regulation to walk the line between these two vivid and quite different choices?

This is the dilemma facing many areas of consumer medical advance. There is a wonderful revolution in the world of medicinal innovation. We must work much harder on the edge cases to make this bountiful for our taxpayers and our patients. This is true in nutrition, medtech, social media and many other fields. Let me give three quick examples.

There is mounting evidence that hallucinogenics might offer treatment for the horrible effects of PTSD. We should probably be encouraging more investment and research, but we will need a regulatory regime that prevents misuse of these potent drugs. After 10 years at the Ministry of Sound, I can testify that they can have both wonderful and devastating effects on one’s psyche.

Ketamine technology is being offered as a new treatment for unlocking psychological challenges, and I know many people who swear by it. However, I read with anger, as other noble Lords might have, about the death of Matthew Perry, the “Friends” star who died when his cynical doctor overprescribed the drug in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees.

Cannabinoid medicines are another case. They offer treatment for those with epilepsy. Campaigners have argued very persuasively for more investment and research, and that they have been held back by arcane attitudes and laws about drug control. Recreational users of cannabinoids argue that edible highs are a healthy alternative to booze. I have grave concerns about the legalisation of cannabis, but, with global attitudes changing quickly, it is surely a possibility that this could happen here in the UK. Too many countries have already legalised marijuana without enough thought; they have not done the boring but important regulatory work around taxation, packaging, sanctions and transparency that encourages responsible behaviours.

We used to live in a binary world where medicines were for doctors, narcotics were for the police and there was a duty for the taxman to collect. But now we are in a more complex world of vapes, hallucinogenic treatments and cannabinoid edibles, where there is a leisure industry, a cosmetics industry and a nutrition industry all with one foot squarely in the medical world and aggressively trying to bend the rules to their advantage. Quite rightly, these industries are making claims that their products can help promote healthiness and fight disease. They have a point: we cannot rely on hospital treatment of disease alone to make Britain healthy. But this shambles around vaping flavours demonstrates what happens if the regulators are fragmented and decision-making does not keep up with innovation. That is why I encourage the Minister to really get stuck into the detail; to bring the various regulators together; to assign responsibility; to insist on much clearer data and reporting from the industry; to set deadlines for changes; to timetable reviews; to move quickly to close gaps; and to identify ingredients—as the noble Lord, Lord Winston, rightly pointed out.

We have a huge opportunity to apply exciting innovations to help the health of the nation and to build valuable businesses, but that is not going to work if our regulators are heavy-handed and move so slowly. Thesequasi-medical industries depend on an unremittingly activist approach to regulation and I ask the Minister to commit to more agile supervision than we have shown around vapes to date; to be prepared to close down bad behaviours when they are explicit; to put in place strict descriptions of what vapes can contain; to look very seriously at the licensing regime, as the noble Lord, Lord Storey, recommended; to look closely at advertising restrictions that get round many of the restrictions that we have on tobacco; and, if necessary, to act firmly in order to protect the vulnerable.