Climate Change
Lord McColl of Dulwich Excerpts(3 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Callanan (Con)
Indeed. I can agree with the noble Lord on the first part of his question. It has been encouraging to see the number of major businesses that have joined us in the race to net zero. I pay tribute to the work of the CBI in helping us to do that. But we have already set a number of quite ambitious targets. We have legislated in this House for the carbon budgets, and we will produce the net zero strategy before COP, which will see further progress.
Lord McColl of Dulwich (Con)
My Lords, as the European continent in the Middle Ages warmed up by 1.5 degrees centigrade and then reverted to normal temperature after a century, can the Minister tell the House of two scientific facts that show that we can stop or reverse climate change?
Lord Callanan (Con)
The noble Lord invites me to indulge in a long debate about the validity or otherwise of the various reports and the IPCC report. Perhaps we could discuss it separately outside. However, the IPCC report was a major piece of work taking on board many of the assessments from world-leading scientists, and we would do well to take it seriously.
Construction Industry: Retention Payments
Lord McColl of Dulwich Excerpts(3 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Callanan (Con)
I know that the noble Lord has been active for many years on this important issue. This has been a slower process than we might have liked, in part due to the complexity of the issues associated with the practice of cash retentions and the wide range of interested parties. While most in the construction industry favour or could accept change, unfortunately no consensus on a preferred solution has emerged from industry to date.
Lord McColl of Dulwich (Con) [V]
My Lords, what happened to the suggestion in the Murray review of 2017 that retention payments for subcontractors and vendors on major projects should be held in a designated trust account? As far as retention payments are concerned, will it help to develop the system of financial rewards for those who settle accounts earlier?
Lord Callanan (Con)
That is indeed one of the policy suggestions we are looking at, but given the complexity of the policy issues, it is premature to commit to the introduction of a retention deposit scheme. We will continue to seek consensus and work with industry to find a way forward.
Intellectual Property Rights: Affordable Drugs
Lord McColl of Dulwich Excerpts(3 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Grimstone of Boscobel (Con)
As the noble Lord knows, nobody is a greater supporter of free trade than my department and me, but short-term considerations occasionally arise, particularly relating to public health emergencies, when those important general principles have to be put aside for very short periods of time to ensure that the NHS has access to the drugs it needs. I am sure most noble Lords would welcome this.
Lord McColl of Dulwich (Con) [V]
My Lords, how much of the overseas aid has been reserved to help to pay for accessible drugs for developing countries?
Lord Grimstone of Boscobel (Con)
My noble friend asks a good question. I do not have those detailed figures at my fingertips; I undertake to write to him.
Clean Growth Fund
Lord McColl of Dulwich Excerpts(4 years ago)
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Lord Callanan (Con)
That is indeed a good quote and I agree to a certain extent with my noble friend, but this is a commercial investment, run by a commercial fund manager. My noble friend will be pleased to know that the Government are playing no role in the selection of the investments. There are private sector investors alongside us and the fund manager is running the fund on a commercial basis.
Lord McColl of Dulwich (Con) [V]
My Lords, as we have limited funds, why do not the Government use the Clean Growth Fund in their efforts to clean up the pollution of the air and the ocean and rid us of the enormous amount of destructive plastics? As our economy is in dire straits, is it not the time for these expensive green plans to be postponed until the economy improves?
Lord Callanan (Con)
The noble Lord makes a good point—we should indeed seek to clean up our environment as much as possible—but, as I said, that is not the purpose of this fund, which is to invest in early-stage green technologies, where a proven funding gap has been shown to exist.
Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (Obligations of Hospitality Undertakings) (England) Regulations 2020
Lord McColl of Dulwich Excerpts(4 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord McColl of Dulwich (Con) [V]
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his helpful and informative introduction to these regulations. I fully support them, as they are important to deal with the increasing number of cases of the virus. When critics repeatedly criticise the Government, should we not ask them what they suggest? For instance, if they object to the rule of six, what number would they suggest? What is the scientific evidence to justify their view?
I was interested in the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, about masks. As a surgeon, I wore a mask almost every day for 60 years, so I know a great deal about them. I repeatedly see people putting their masks below their chins, then replacing them. They are then ineffective. As for coughing and sneezing, I notice that they turn their head to the right or left, which ensures that the content of the cough or sneeze goes straight into the face of the person opposite. What advice has been given to them? What about microdroplets, which go straight through the masks? There is so much that we still do not know about this virus.
Maritime Industry
Lord McColl of Dulwich Excerpts(4 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Callanan (Con)
The Government agree with the need to increase diversity in the maritime sector if it is to meet the challenges of the future. Of course, we need to embrace talent from everywhere. In support of this, we have been working actively with the sector to promote greater diversity. One notable success has been the Women in Maritime task force, established in 2018.
Lord McColl of Dulwich (Con) [V]
My Lords, could the Minister tell us how far on the research into the use of butane, methane and ammonia is? Although the use of ammonia creates zero harmful emissions, my shipping friends here in Norway tell me that using ammonia as a fuel creates a very unpleasant smell. Is that problem being addressed? Incidentally, does the Minister know that the noble Lord, Lord Mountevans, is very highly thought of in the maritime world, especially here in Norway?
Lord Callanan (Con)
Yes, I was aware of the high regard in which many Peers in this House, including the noble Lord, Lord Mountevans, are held in all countries, including Norway, I am sure. I agree with the noble Lord that the challenge of decarbonisation in the maritime sector is a great one and we are looking at a number of alternative fuels, one of which is ammonia.
Life Sciences Industrial Strategy (Science and Technology Committee Report)
Lord McColl of Dulwich Excerpts(6 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord McColl of Dulwich (Con)
My Lords, we are grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Patel, for chairing this important committee and for securing this debate. I am also grateful to him for inviting me to speak in the debate on preventive medicine and the role of the NHS. The report draws attention to the health service’s failure to implement the results of research.
The greatest threat to the health of the British people today is the worst epidemic for 100 years: namely, the obesity epidemic. Half the people are either overweight or, frankly, obese. This has produced four million type 2 diabetics, increasing rates of cancer, heart disease, joint disease, gangrene of the limbs, blindness, dementia and many more. We keep being told, “It’s all very difficult—it’s multifactorial, you know”. Only one factor causes obesity, and that is putting too many calories into one’s mouth. We need to eat fewer calories and eat foods that satisfy hunger.
How did we get into this mess of the worst epidemic for 100 years? During the war there was no obesity, because we ate the right food in the right quantity and it satisfied hunger. How? Because we used to eat things like fat, dripping or lard on wholemeal bread, and whole milk—none of this skimmed nonsense. Why did all this change? It changed because the unscrupulous junk food industry realised that fat was an essential food which limited the amount that we ate, and so it demonised fat and advocated and produced food which was low in fat and high in carbohydrates. The problem with this is that low-fat, high-carbohydrate food is pretty tasteless, and so to make people eat it the industry added large quantities of sugar. So the obesity epidemic was born: low fat, high carbohydrate and high sugar, and the nation began to become more and more obese.
In the early 1960s, Professor John Yudkin warned of the danger of a low-fat, high-sugar diet, but the food lobby and other miscreants managed to rubbish his work and have him dismissed from the Chair of Nutrition at the University of London. The science is quite straightforward and has been known for years, although it was not introduced but ignored because of the powerful food lobby. As noble Lords already know, when fat enters the duodenum it releases hormones such as cholecystokinin and gastric inhibitory peptide. These delay the emptying of the stomach and give the sensation of fullness, which satisfies hunger, and you stop eating. When the fat is emulsified and absorbed it passes further down the alimentary tract, then normal service is resumed in the stomach. It is a very precise and effective mechanism. But the unscrupulous junk food industry had to sabotage that mechanism in order to increase its sales and profits. The sabotage involved demonising fat.
This whole subject has been bedevilled by misleading advice, most of it deliberately misleading, allowing the food industry to produce cheap food that does not satisfy, and so people eat more and more of it and get fatter and fatter. The tragedy of all this is that mainly those in the lower income groups are worst affected by the seduction of the unscrupulous junk food industry. Unfortunately, the public have been bombarded with thoroughly misleading information and advice. They have been told that exercise is the best way to get rid of excess fat. You have to run miles to take even a pound of fat off. Only a fraction of the calories we eat is expended on exercise. Of course, exercise is important for general health and a sense of well-being.
Obesity in children has now reached enormous proportions, and the problem starts before the age of five, before they go to school. If a woman is pregnant and obese, she transfers this tendency towards obesity to the child in utero, not genetically but by a mechanism that is not understood, and so we put it into Greek and call it epigenetics. So the die is cast at any early age, and the tendency to obesity is there. But the good news is that it does not need to lead to obesity; it can do so only if the child eats too many calories. There is a condition, myxoedema, where the thyroid gland fails, and people with that condition tend to put on weight. However, they can do that only if they are eating too many calories.
Even today, the Department of Health is still advocating exercise and diet as the answer. Only a fraction of the calories we eat is used up in exercise, so the department should stop talking about how exercise and diet is the solution. It should emphasise that the answer is to put fewer calories into the mouth. Its slogan “exercise and diet” should be changed; it should emphasise diet and give exercise the lower profile as far as obesity is concerned.
Saturated and trans fats should be minimised but not the majority of fats. During a Select Committee on the long-term future of the NHS, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Patel, we were served up with some rather curious, dubious statistics, one of which was that the obesity epidemic was costing £4 billion a year. I suggested that the point was in the wrong place. It was much more likely to be £40 billion. That is what is wrecking the NHS. Curing obesity could release £40 billion; obviously not all of that would be released but it would be a start.
We have an enormous job on our hands in preventive medicine as we are in the middle of this disastrous epidemic, the worst for 100 years. We need not only to reduce the size of the epidemic but to start preventing the next generation falling into the same trap. I suggested to the Select Committee that we needed an all-out campaign—involving every man, woman and child, every institution and government department—not to tell people what to do but simply to tell them the truth. The answer is to have smaller portions and smaller plates, food that you have to chew, such as wholemeal bread, vegetables and nuts—clearly, avoiding food to which you are allergic. Some of the expert witnesses from the hierarchy told us that all-out campaigns do not work. We pointed out that the Lord Speaker’s campaign against AIDS when he was Secretary of State for Health, as Norman Fowler, was highly successful, largely, I suspect, because he was absolutely honest and direct and did not mince his words.
GPs have been told by the Department of Health not to call patients obese because it is judgmental. They ought to realise that there is a distinct difference between being judgmental and making accurate diagnoses. The message is simple. The obesity epidemic is killing millions, costing billions and the cure is free.