Food: Labelling

Lord Borrie Excerpts

Monday 1st November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

I echo the “Hear, hears!” from around the House and congratulate my noble friend on paying tribute to the UK food industry, in particular to United Kingdom fruit. We are, as I said, trying to facilitate a number of voluntary industry agreements to try to encourage more labelling of food. On this front, we want to pursue—dare I say it?—a stick-and-carrot approach in terms of encouraging greater development. The stick, as it were, is being provided by the EU food information regulations; the carrot will be by food industry voluntary agreements.

[Lord Borrie]

Does the Minister agree that one of the major problems with food labelling, especially in supermarkets on tins and packages, is that there is a superfluity of it in very tiny print, which is impossible to read—and that it is impossible there and then, in the supermarket, to distinguish what is important, what is significant, and what is not?

[Lord Henley]

I agree that very often there can be too much information. That, too, is why it is far better to try to pursue a lot of these matters through voluntary agreements, whereby a simpler process can be developed that is of greater use—to, for example, the noble Lord—than something more complicated and more bureaucratic that ends up producing too much information which the noble Lord, and many others, find rather difficult to read.