Obesity

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Wednesday 18th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord McColl, for securing the debate and for the wise words he always gives us on this topic, from an authoritative position. Like him I look forward greatly to the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott. I am sure that she will add greatly to our deliberations not only today but in the future.

I shall focus on child obesity. I am sorry that our time is limited, because this is a very big subject. I do not understand why, because we have no further business today—

[A noble Lord]

Yes, we have.

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe]

We have some more business, do we? Then I withdraw that comment.

I shall focus on the child obesity plan. Contrary to some of the criticisms I have made in the past—although I shall make a few today—I share the view of the noble Lord, Lord McColl, that we are at last moving in the right direction. I believe that the publication of chapter 2 of the plan, which came out not too long ago, included some bold adventurous measures. My first question to the Minister is therefore to ask him whether the current consultations are within a specific timeframe. If so, when they conclude, will there be additions to chapter 2, or will the Government produce a chapter 3 to follow it?

I ask that question because I have previously raised a number of points about two or three fundamentals that had been missed from both the first plan and chapter 2. In particular I, like the noble Lord, Lord McColl, believe that there is a case for a wide-ranging and focused national campaign involving everyone but focusing especially on children. I argued that there was no mention of the broadcasters in chapter 2 or the earlier plan, other than in the context of the watershed and advertising, which is an entirely separate issue. I believe that there is a role for broadcasters working with government to try to ensure that this major problem that we face is addressed properly and over the widest possible front.

I have had some conversations with the BBC, and asked it to point me to a major programme that it had produced focusing solely on child obesity and communicating primarily with children. It is doing a lot of programmes, but it struggled to identify such a programme. I am pleased that Public Health England has now taken up the baton, is in conversation with the BBC and will have further talks early in September. That is good progress in the right direction, but I would welcome some advice from the Minister about how that will fit in with the present plan.

To make my second point I return to what the noble Lord, Lord McColl, said. To recover from any problem we need a diagnosis in the first instance. The real problem we have now with obesity is that people do not think that they are overweight: there is great dispute about that. We do not know what the weights of children from 11 to 16 or 18 are. We have a lot of evidence about children aged four and 11, but once they get to 11 we move to a different system of measurement, and only a couple of thousand people aged from nought to 16 are analysed. Of those, surprisingly, 50% required a visit by a nurse, which suggests there is a problem there that has not been fully examined.

I notice that I am running out of time, so I shall conclude quickly. I have been writing about the need for weighing people so that they are aware of what they weigh. Public Health England does not as yet agree with that, and neither do the Government, but I believe we need to get back to the hard facts to take the programme further forward. I hope that the Minister will be prepared to have a look at this topic with others who, like me, believe we need the facts in the first instance to make the progress required.