Food, Diet and Obesity Committee Report

Baroness Brown of Silvertown Excerpts

Friday 28th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brown of Silvertown (Lab)]

My Lords, I too am grateful to the Food, Diet and Obesity Committee, which wrote this report. It is excellent, but it paints a picture that this country has a real problem with food. As has already been stated today, the prevalence of cheap, unhealthy foods filled with sugar, salt and fat has fuelled an obesity epidemic and causes real damage to individuals’ health and to the NHS. According to a Frontier Economics report, obesity-related illness costs £6.5 billion a year, so it also damages the UK economy.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, said, there have been over 700 proposed policies to tackle this issue over the years since 1992, but none have worked. Healthy food has become a luxury for many in this country, something that some people simply cannot afford. There is a very real and increasing health gap between the richest and the poorest. We have relied on the good faith of the food industry for far too long—that it will voluntarily reformulate its products—and we have told people they must eat healthier. But this report lays bare our failings and demands a radical shift in our policy. We simply must change the food landscape, encourage companies to produce healthier food, focus on children, and ensure that all are able to access a healthy diet.

The levy on sugary drinks caused sizeable reductions in sugar levels and had a greater effect on the health of the nation than a voluntary measure could possibly have achieved, so I add my voice to the mandatory regulations lobby. Mandatory reformulations will create a level playing field, encourage all companies to commit to producing healthier food and can only be good for all of us, including the industry. But for many people in this country, eating healthily is simply not an option. I fear it would really be very problematic to reform the food industry, potentially increasing the price of unhealthy food, without making healthier alternatives available to all. I hope that the Government’s future food strategy will go some way to telling us how they intend to deal with that.

But let me talk about children in the time I have left. I welcome the Government’s commitment to maternal and infant health, as well as the detailed nutritional guidance recently published by NICE; it will undoubtedly help families provide their children with a balanced and healthy diet. But advice only goes so far. As this report highlights, there is incontrovertible evidence that children starting reception in more deprived areas are twice as likely to be obese as children from the least deprived areas. Families in poverty face real difficulties accessing enough healthy food for their children to meet the advised nutritional guidance on fruit and veg. It is expensive.

Many schoolchildren face food insecurity. I have many tales from my time as an MP illustrating just how desperate it can be, with children taking it in turns to eat on school nights. Families who live in temporary accommodation—some in hotels—have simply no access to cookers, sinks and fridges; while others who have access to fridges and cookers may not have cooking equipment because they had to relinquish it in their many moves through temporary accommodation, and simply had no space to store it.

Holidays can also be a food and financial nightmare, so I was absolutely delighted to see the Government commit to extending the holiday activities and food programme for another year; it is an absolute lifeline for so many families. I hope that the spending review will provide multi-year guaranteed funding for the programme.

Wealth inequalities in this country have grown over the last decade. Some 24% of schoolchildren are now eligible for free school meals, and while the numbers eligible increased, government spending lagged behind inflation. Since 2014, there has been a 17% real-terms cut in funding for free school meals. The report states that current funding results in many schools being unable to meet the Government’s food standards or provide a healthy meal to children. It details cases of recipients of free school meals being able to afford only a fried or battered chicken in a flimsy wrap or a white bun—no sauce, no salad, no fruit. Without proper enforcement, the school food standards are not worth the paper they are written on.

Sharon Hodgson MP, a good friend of mine, has been an unremitting campaigner for universal free school meals. She believes that free school meals would be a significant answer to some of the issues in this report, and she is absolutely right. They can be a game changer, but only when done right. There is no incentive for caterers to serve healthy, nutritious and tasty food at lunchtime, especially when cost pressures mean that the quality and portions of the food are being compromised. There is so much more to be said, and I have run out of time, but I absolutely know that this Government have the will, the talent and the drive to meet the health challenges of inequalities, to try and reform our food environment and tackle the root causes of obesity and poverty. I look forward to the committee’s further reports in the future.