Early Years Education

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Thursday 30th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness. What a fascinating and wide-ranging debate this has proved to be. I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Andrews for securing the debate and for the excellent way in which she introduced it. I note that I am the first male to speak. I spoke to her about whether I should put my name down as I thought I would be rather wide of the mark, but as I listened to the contributions, particularly from my noble friend Lady Goudie on free school meals, I recognised that, rather like the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, while I am not an expert on education I have spent a bit of time working on health.

When we look at the totality of what influences babies and children in their early years and children early on in school, all these important factors come together—media, the environment, what we eat and do not eat, what we are taught. My contribution will, I am sure, make the Minister groan, as we have been on the subject as recently as two weeks ago: what we feed our children and what we do not feed our children but should. I declare an interest as a founding member of the All-Party Group on Nutrition: Science and Health and as a vice-chair of the All-Party Group on Obesity. In recent years I have increasingly spent more time on children and obesity than on adult obesity.

Labour has an extraordinarily good record. We should keep saying this over the coming months. Back at the turn of the century, the Labour Government then in power started to get concerned about the growth in obesity among schoolchildren and babies. There was a programme on the radio today about babies’ food. One of the big issues is the amount of sugar that we are feeding to babies, unbeknown to many parents as they feed their children. I declare my interest as a patron of a small charity, Sugarwise, which was founded by a woman who happened to look at the ingredients in what she was feeding her baby. She was astounded by the high element of sugar that her child was being fed, which she believed had an influence. It continues and there is a very big case for further work to be done on babies’ food, but today I am looking at schoolchildren.

The Labour Government were concerned about children aged three to four, and upwards, that were starting to put on weight. In 2006, after doing some research, they introduced the national child measurement programme to check the height and weight of most schoolchildren from age four to five and 10 and 11. It has now also gone into school breakfasts. The aim was to track the changes that were taking place with children’s height and weight, to assess whether they were overweight and if they were then to try to take measures in conjunction with local schools and parents to try to reverse the growth in obesity. In 2007, they turned their attention to school meals because they recognised that, if they were to influence the course of events on health, this was the area where they had the greatest scope. They examined the quality of school meals and then in 2008 devised a programme to produce a set of regulations on the quality of school meals being presented to our children. Unfortunately, we went out of power in 2010, but that was a very ambitious and comprehensive programme. What a great pity that we were not able to stay in power and enforce those regulations properly, as we would not be facing the problems we now have with our young children.

In 2013, the coalition Government decided to do a review of those regulations governing the quality of school meals, and they changed them. There was concern about insufficient energy in the definitions, so they eased the rules—believe it or not—so that it was possible to increase the amount of sugar in the meals. The Front Bench of the Lib Dems have some responsibility for this, as they were then part of the coalition. I do not know whether they agreed with what was happening in the coalition Government’s internal debates, but they were certainly part of it. Public Health England started getting worried in 2016 about the continued growth in obesity, and it set up a programme aiming to reduce it by 20% in children by 2020. There was then an intention by the Conservative Government to undertake a review of those regulations in 2018-19, but then—in fairness to them—Covid hit us, and they have not had the opportunity to do so.

We have reached a stage where children are continuing to put on weight. Not only that, but we are now starting to identify children aged 10 to 11 with type 2 diabetes. These are people who will have their lives shortened. If this cannot be reversed, they will have attendant problems with ill health in their 40s and 50s, and possibly even end up with amputations taking place. The Government have responsibility in these areas. People like me have been pressing them to undertake this review of the regulations and reduce the amount of sugar that is now permitted to be served to children, early in school as well as at breakfasts, back to at least the level applied by the regulations introduced by the good Labour Government in 2007-08.

My colleagues here, whom I hope will be going into government, should take note of this. They should congratulate the former Labour Government for what they did on this and we should pick that up and run with it. If the present Government are not prepared to undertake a review of these regulations governing food, the Labour Government in their manifesto should at least be willing to commit to look at the quality of school meals, seek to improve it and reduce the amount of sugar in them.

I pressed the Minister two weeks ago to do that, on the basis of the good messages I heard from her side, her Front Bench and her health spokesperson, and in writing. I thought that there would be a review this autumn, yet I regret that, when the noble Baroness responded two weeks ago, she gave no indication at all that that would happen. I hope the Minister will reflect on that in the light of this House’s decision to set up a special committee to look at ultra-processed food, sugar, fat and salt. That group will be doing that work over the coming year and I hope that I might be a member, as I would press, as your Lordships might expect, that it looks especially at what happens to children. As we have said in so many other areas, what happens in their early years governs their development for the rest of their lives. Without good health, we do not get good education and all that goes with it.

I hope the Minister reflects on whether to do this review, because it is urgently needed. This is not a party-political issue: children are entitled to better food than they are getting at the moment. The Minister may say that it is healthy and nutritious. I think it probably is nutritious, but whether it is healthy is highly questionable, given the amount of sugar that is now going in. I have even been getting complaints from people who produce school meals that they are unhappy about what they have to produce and serve because, with the cost pressures now on them, they feel that they are not able to make the best possible food for children. I hope the Minister reflects on that and maybe redeems the Government by putting in place the review earlier than she had indicated last time we spoke about this.