Health Improvement and Food Production

Lord Kirkham Excerpts

Thursday 7th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kirkham (Con)]

Few subjects arouse stronger passions than the food that we consume. This should be no surprise given the well-attested evidence that we really are what we eat. In my home town of Doncaster—now, happily my home city—more than a decade ago, as some noble Lords may recall, a group of parents attained notoriety by defying Jamie Oliver’s well-intentioned efforts to improve the nutritional quality of school meals. They famously pushed and levered burgers, pies, chips and fizzy pop through the school railings into the hands of their offspring to save them from the dreaded fate of a healthy salad or, God forbid, fresh fruit. To this day, there is a whole cohort of millennials who will never forgive Jamie for depriving them of the turkey twizzlers they loved so much.

Interviewed by the Daily Mirror five years after her intervention, one mother leading the Doncaster protest conceded that her children were indeed “technically” overweight but were healthy and, most important to her, happy. Happiness is a key performance indicator that is nowhere to be found in the extensive briefing notes prepared for this debate. Those notes offered a diet of almost unremitting gloom: war, climate change, labour shortages, soaring prices, growing obesity, ill-health and premature death.

I know from personal experience that eating more healthily over time has led to a substantial reduction in my own weight and produced a significant and sustained improvement in my sense of well-being and consequently my happiness. But I am conscious that I am in the fortunate position of being able to afford to buy the finest, freshest, locally produced food at all times. Life will, without doubt, look very different for my fellow Doncastrians and others if they inhabit the minimum-wage economy, maybe rely on benefits, and perhaps are struggling to feed the whole family on £25 a week or less. For them, only budget supermarkets or food banks are the realistic options, and they will quite naturally tend to favour foodstuffs that keep hunger at bay and are cheap and easy to prepare.

It is a shocking fact of contemporary life that, in many cases, food banks struggle to give away potatoes and other fresh vegetables because their clients simply cannot afford the gas or electricity to boil them. In this very real cost of living crisis, the last thing that struggling families need is people such as us lecturing them on how they ought to eat more healthily to relieve the pressure on the NHS—they do not want to hear that.

I am regularly in contact with farmers and was for several years a major investor in a well-known budget supermarket chain. I can state with absolute confidence, from first-hand, personal knowledge, that no farmer or food retailer in this country that I have ever encountered wants to produce or sell anything other than good food—not only food that is high-quality and nutritious but food that is affordable and allows them to make a living from growing or selling it. Supermarkets do not develop products to make their customers fatter or sicker, but they do respond to market demands and provide what people like to eat and want to buy. In recent years, they have all significantly expanded their plant-based ranges, as flexitarian lifestyles have grown in popularity. That is good news for public health, of course, and for our planet, in terms of the reduction in carbon emissions.

The challenge for legislators is that the great British public do not like being lectured about what is good for them. If they did, they would have voted remain by an overwhelming majority in 2016. This is why I have considerable sympathy with the Government’s alleged dilution of Henry Dimbleby’s undoubtedly well-intended recommendations in the national food strategy. We can nudge people, as has been successfully achieved via the reformulation of many products after the introduction of a sugar tax, and the new rules on the display of foods that are high in fat, salt and sugar will gently play their part too. We can tell people what is good for them and their families, but we must not tell them off if they feel that they cannot afford to take official advice or are simply disinclined to. In the long run, as Keynes famously remarked, we are all dead, whether we eat healthily and sparingly or gorge ourselves on fatty and sugary treats.

In my view, food is of such elemental concern to everysingle one of us that a wise Government will adopt the posture that Walter Bagehot saw as the proper role of the monarchy in the Victorian constitution; that is

“the right to encourage, and the right to warn”.

As the noble Lord, Lord McColl of Dulwich, passionately stated in this Chamber in his 2018 debate on obesity, do not tell people what to do but

“tell them the truth—not in a patronising way”.—[Official Report, 18/7/18; col. 1263.]

Step beyond this and attempt to dictate what people should eat and feed to their children for their own good and we compromise the vital principle of the pursuit of happiness so fatally that we would swiftly find ourselves back in the realm of people pushing metaphorical pies and burgers through the railings of official guidance.

Covid-19: Masks

Lord Kirkham Excerpts

Thursday 11th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kirkham (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I grew up in a world where the only wearers of face masks were bank robbers, sexual deviants and the Lone Ranger, in a mining community where the underground workforce would have benefitted from wearing face masks, but did not, and paid the price. It seems now that, in many situations, masks will be mandatory, yet not long ago, we were informed by Public Health England that face masks were worse than useless outside of clinical settings. The subsequent volte-face, inconsistency across the devolved Administrations, and publicity given to more draconian recommendations by the World Health Organization are confusing and damaging to essential credibility and trust. Whatever the veracity of the mask concept, if we want the public to take our advice, then the message needs to be bold, clear and, above all, consistent until the pandemic is over. At that time, I trust that non-clinical masks will be worn only as a fashion accessory, and by those with unusual hobbies.

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)]

My Lords, I understand that the noble Lords, Lord Pendry and Lord Wei, have withdrawn, so I call the noble Baroness, Lady Barker.

Obesity

Lord Kirkham Excerpts

Wednesday 18th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kirkham (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, on a smashing maiden speech. The Duchess of Windsor famously observed, “You can never be too rich or too thin” and I have often reflected on both parts of that proposition. If we accept the Dalai Lama’s analysis that the purpose of life is to be happy, the jury is definitely out on wealth—I have met a number of billionaires who are utterly miserable. On weight, though, I have no doubt whatever there is a definite correlation between increased girth and reduced enjoyment of life. As evidence of this, I cannot think of ever having met anyone who actually wanted to be obese.

Other vices, from smoking to drug-taking and sex addiction, have their enthusiastic defenders and of course there are many who shamelessly revel in the delights of eating and drinking. But who will speak positively of the consequences? Who lauds the up side of obesity? I know of no one. Most severely overweight people want and try to lose weight, so what is the issue? The NHS website, in a perhaps slightly oversimplified way, captures succinctly what we all know:

“Obesity is generally caused by eating too much and moving too little”.


If that is truly the case, surely the answer—we have heard it from lots of people today—is simply: eat less and move more. Obesity is clearly preventable and reversible.

I will concentrate on the “eating less” element—that is, eating less and eating better—and on how the Government can help. The importance, or otherwise, of exercise for health and well-being has been well covered by other noble Lords. Thankfully, the Government are on the case and have made an excellent start with their strategy and aim to halve childhood obesity by 2030, but plans and targets are not enough—not in a life-or-death situation, and not if the doctor is reluctant to treat you or the airline to fly you and people snigger when you give it your best shot at running for the bus.

Implementation of an effective plan is key, but the use of words such as “debate”, “consult”, “encourage” and “voluntary” are not very encouraging. They will take us nowhere and certainly do not reflect the urgency of the need to act right now to contain, curb and reverse this frightening, pernicious epidemic, which I believe is threatening our society. I prefer words such as “regulation”, “mandate”, “legislate” and “controls”. In that way we might just stop our food manufacturers and supermarkets selling food full of bad fats, sugar and salt, which are slowly killing us. This is a serious situation by any measure and it requires strong, determined and unambiguous action, not words. As the noble Lord, Lord Addington, said, this is a topic that we have talked to death in this Chamber.

We have already enjoyed past successes in changing anti-social and personally destructive habits. These include smoking and driving without a seatbelt or with a hand-held mobile phone. I believe that we just need to take more of the same action because it is proven. However, I suggest, without any wish to be humorous, that tackling obesity is the biggest challenge of them all, so let us institute, without undue delay, a powerful, emotive, heavyweight, long-term and high-profile advertising and marketing campaign, certainly online and on TV. It would be self-funding, with the aim of educating, influencing, encouraging and supporting, and it would help to counter the prolific advertising of junk food, which it is to be hoped the Government will tightly regulate soon. Such a campaign should of course be judiciously combined with an essential strong and clear regulatory framework, sanctions and fiscal measures designed to encourage or discourage as appropriate.

By succeeding in reducing obesity, the savings to the NHS alone, as has been mentioned many times, would be mega, but the real benefits, which are hard to overstate, would be accrued through fitter and healthier members of our society enjoying a more fulfilled, productive and happy life. Therefore, let us make this debating Chamber an action Chamber.