Health and Care Bill

Debate between Lord Stevens of Birmingham and Lord Bethell

Committee stage
Friday 4th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Schedule 17 generally and in support of Amendment 244 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay. In doing so, I declare my wife’s interest as a board director of Tesco and Diageo.

I will focus my comments on the amendments supported by my noble friends Lord Vaizey and Lord Moylan. In doing so, I seek to address all the amendments they have put forward, which seek to: extend the implementation period for the new restrictions; introduce brand advertising exemptions; and bring in effectiveness reviews and sunset clauses, and all the other clauses that seek to water down the really important measures in the Bill on junk food advertising. I recognise that the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, has already gone through some of these amendments in detail, so I do not want to go through that again. However, I am aware that my noble friend Lord Vaizey and other noble Lords have brushed off the Government’s obesity strategy as wrong-headed and doomed; indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, has shared his view that the measures in the Bill are disproportionate.

I want to reflect for a moment on what we are trying to do here. As a country, we have got into a situation where, by every measure, we are seriously overweight. The worst affected are our children. We have heard, both in this debate and many times in this Chamber, that two in five children are overweight. The worst-affected children are the poorest children, who are twice as likely to be overweight. In thinking about the environment our children are being brought up in—this question of environment is absolutely critical—what are our values as a nation if we knowingly create an environment that encourages children to develop addictions to foods that we know will hurt them, adversely affect their moods, hold back their learning, reduce their self-worth and damage their health for years to come?

Through the pandemic, we have seen that now is the time to lean into this ongoing national disaster. The measures in this Bill are necessary because they are an essential condition for an overall change in the direction of travel of childhood obesity prevalence. The challenge is going from an increase in the weight of our children of around 1% per year to a decrease of 4.2% per year. That is an astonishing mission and a massive challenge. No country has ever undertaken such a thing.

However, I am not convinced that we can just hope that our primary schools will do all the heavy lifting to achieve this. Somehow, as a country, we have to change the way in which we run our lives. This will require a change in the environment in which our children learn about, engage with and buy food—and that includes the media they consume. If we fail, for every year that this is not achieved, the rate of change needed in future years will grow, and thousands more children will be exposed to the physical and mental health impacts of obesity.

The noble Lord, Lord Krebs, talked eloquently about how, 20 years ago, the Hastings report had this research nailed. There is now a sense of urgency, which is why these measures are needed. It is why we cannot seek to extend the implementation periods for new restrictions; this will just drag them out indefinitely and undermine the seriousness of the programme. It is why we cannot give brand advertising an exemption that clearly leaves the door wide open for the same old advertising in different ways. It is why we should not commit to effectiveness reviews that will become a rear-guard action to unpick these regulations, nor commit to sunset clauses that will give industry false hope that somehow the Government will just give up on these measures or the problem will go away.

To reach the 2030 target, it is absolutely crucial that the Government continue with these plans to restrict junk food advertising on TV and—as the noble Viscount rightly said—online, and do not waste any more time. It is also crucial that we introduce fiscal measures to speed up reformulation at the same time, making healthy eating more accessible to everyone. It is absolutely clear from our data that any delay in action or the implementation of proposals to address childhood obesity will have a significant impact on the ability of the Government to achieve their ambition. More children will grow ill and live shorter lives.

I hear—loudly and clearly—the concerns of my noble friends Lord Vaizey and Lord Moylan, and the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones. I hear their concerns about the science, the research and the public health epidemiology that underpin these measures. I do not agree with their scepticism but I do hear their concerns, so let me pick off a couple of them.

My noble friend Lord Vaizey expressed scepticism about the effectiveness of these measures. He is right that these advertising restrictions will not work on their own. Obesity is a complex issue and no one single policy can solve it. However, small steps matter. It can take as little as 46 extra calories a day for children to gain excess weight, and seeing just one minute of HFSS adverts leads to children eating an extra 14 calories a day on average.

As I said earlier, this question of environment is absolutely critical. I accept that we need population-level structural policies to address the social and economic drivers of obesity, to then address the growing inequalities between the most and the least-deprived children. That is why the levelling-up White Paper earlier this week that tackles housing, education, deprivation and many other aspects of British life was critical to this debate and forms the context in which we should discuss these measures. It is also why my noble friend should not feel that the broadcast and food industries are in some way being uniquely scapegoated. This is a national programme that will touch on many lives.

My noble friends are right to express concerns about the fortune of the broadcast and internet industries, two jewels in Britain’s creative industries and employers that drive local economies. I want to reassure them. I once worked in the media industry and have not forgotten the intense competition for advertising and the existential battle with big tech, but my noble friend Lord Vaizey spoke as if many of these companies would find that all communication by these companies on all their products to all their target markets would somehow be terminated forthwith and that the British public service broadcast industry would be thrown into destitution. That is just not quite right. Cancer Research UK found that ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Sky One derive a small proportion—just 8% of their total ad revenue—from adverts for HFSS foods.

It is true that almost two-thirds of HFSS product adverts aired between 6 and 9 pm fall within the category that UKHSA has identified as the highest contributors of sugar calories in people’s diets, a fact that I found quite alarming, but under a 9 pm watershed broadcasters would have lost only 5% of their total advertising revenue if all HFSS adverts were removed completely, without anything in their place. Noble Lords should know that over three-quarters—79%—of potential revenue loss from removing HFSS adverts could be mitigated against by companies advertising their existing non-HFSS products instead of promoting their HFSS products. Healthy foods can still be advertising.

It is just not right to call these measures appalling and crude or ridiculous and blunt. To change the environment in which our children make decisions about food is critical for this national mission, and to contribute to a campaign to improve the health of children is a commendable aspiration for these government measures.

[Lord Stevens of Birmingham (CB)]

My Lords, perhaps channelling the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, from this morning, I congratulate the Government on including in the Bill these measures to tackle childhood obesity. As we have heard, with one in four children not just overweight but clinically obese, we are storing up huge problems for the future because we know that what starts in childhood continues into adulthood. In that sense, diet is destiny. Unfortunately, obesity is the new smoking. We know that it is the cause of avoidable heart attacks, strokes, 13 different types of cancer, and respiratory disease, and causes a far higher risk of dying from Covid. Clearly action is needed, and the Bill makes a start.

If anything, these measures, which are certainly proportionate, may be overly targeted. Some of the criticisms levelled at the Bill should have given rise to amendments to extend its scope to deal with some of the loopholes or to level the playing field into other digital aspects that people are concerned about. That would have been a constructive response to legitimate concerns. Instead, I cannot help feeling that this morning we have heard from opponents who are simultaneously arguing that the measures in the Bill go too far and at the same time will not be effective enough, and to ensure that this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy they have included amendments which would essentially fillet the Bill of its active ingredients.

These are familiar tactics. This is the tactic of deny, dilute and delay. The first is denying, claiming to us as parents that ads and marketing make little meaningful difference to kids’ consumption; but on the other hand we have companies—presumably rational economic actors—spending maybe hundreds of millions of pounds every year on the basis that exactly the opposite is true. Like Schrödinger’s cat, which is simultaneously dead and alive, it seems that junk food advertising and marketing simultaneously does and does not work. What is at stake here is not quantum physics but the physical and mental health of millions of children.