Diets: Fat

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Thursday 31st October 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord McColl of Dulwich, for this debate. I pay tribute to his long and consistent work in this area. He is experienced in a whole range of different aspects of this, having been a surgeon, and probably knows more about the gut than I ever will. My contribution is one of gratitude for having a peg on which I can hang a coat and pick up several other topics related to obesity.

Obesity, like drink or drugs, comes from filling the empty hole inside us. It can lead to greed, excess and, as we see in many areas, premature death, or certainly an unhealthy later life. It represents a great cost to the NHS and we have to continue working on it. I declare an interest as a member of the Food, Diet and Obesity Committee, which has just produced the report Recipe for Health. We did not focus excessively on fat, but I am sure that colleagues who are better qualified than I may make contributions on that topic.

We did not focus on the new drugs either. I am worried about what lies ahead with the changes in prospect from those drugs. I shall say a little more about that. In the committee, to the extent that I was able to attend, I focused primarily on the fundamental problem of excess sugar being consumed, particularly by children, who I worry about, and the consequences of that. The major reason why children go to hospitals and A&E is dental problems, which in the main arise from sugar.

Like our committee, I should have liked to see taxes introduced to reduce the amount of sugar that we find in soft drinks and elsewhere, but we did not get that yesterday in the Budget. Instead, we got a reduction in the price of alcohol—what a surprise. Our report did not look at the point the noble Lord, Lord McColl, raised about the effect of alcohol on obesity. I welcome my noble friend the Minister, who is listening to me again on this topic. I have been campaigning for years that we should show calories not just on menus but on all drinks. The one area of drinks that is excepted, of course, is alcohol. The previous Government were looking at that and undertaking consultation. I do not know whether they ever concluded it, so could my noble friend say whether they did? She may not have the answer to hand, but could she write to us? If it was concluded, what is the outturn of that exercise and when will we see a Labour Government prepared to introduce calories to labelling on alcohol? Some of her forebears spoke in favour of it when I was campaigning for this over a decade ago. It is sugar that worries me.

The new drugs will be used and needed, but we have to avoid some of the difficulties of lack of regulation and oversight that we have had in the past when new drugs have been introduced. I have done work over many years on addiction related to drink and drugs. I did work on heroin in the early part of this century, when methadone was introduced in lieu of heroin to try to reduce harm. We were spending next to nothing in 2005 on methadone. I cannot now get from the Government a precise or even a round figure on what we are spending currently on methadone, but the rumour is that it is about £1 billion a year, when you take into account not just producing it but the way it has to be administered and the secondary trading that takes place. This is the danger that I bring to the Committee’s attention, which we must be aware of. Unless we keep strict controls on the new drug, we could see it mushroom and spread very quickly indeed—and we could even see secondary markets start to develop. I hope that the Minister is aware of that.

Can we look for incentives to get the food and drinks industry to change its approach? I know that some of them are willing to have conversations about trying to have better formulas in foods, and I hope the Government will be prepared to move on that front.