Health and Care Bill

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 2 & Report stage
Monday 7th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)]

My Lords, I should declare that I am chairman of the Communications and Digital Select Committee. I support Amendment 151A and the others in the name of my noble friend Lord Black of Brentwood. I do so because this is a matter of fairness.

Following on from what the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, has just said, the broadcasters have accepted that a pre-watershed ban on junk food advertising is coming. They and I also understand that the online platforms face a complete ban. However, once again, the legacy or heritage media businesses are the only ones which will face serious financial penalties if they make a mistake and, for whatever reason, allow a non-compliant piece of advertising to slip through and appear on air. I am sure that my noble friend the Minister will emphasise that the difference between the online platforms and broadcasters is only therefore about regulatory burdens and sanctions, but that is the point, and it is why this is unfair.

Why should the media businesses which will be significantly disadvantaged commercially by the ad ban be the only ones fined if something goes wrong? Why should the media businesses which continue to lose ad revenue to online platforms stand by and watch as those same platforms—Google, Facebook, YouTube—are not yet subject to any statutory regulatory regime to prevent their unfair market dominance? How can it be right that they shrug their shoulders when it comes to liability for the ads they profit from? They profit from them to a much larger degree than the broadcasters profit from the ads they run.

When I spoke in Committee, the Minister said in reply that all this would be dealt with via the online advertising programme and that a consultation would start shortly. Any progress on that will be welcome, but there is a limit to how much consultation the media industry can take. What it needs is action, which means legislation to deal with these various digital market and competition issues that currently favour big online platforms and are detrimental to everyone else, including consumers. To fail to do that while prioritising legislation that hits the traditional broadcasters more harshly than online platforms is unfair.

As I have said, those of us who support the amendments in the name of my noble friend Lord Black do not want to delay the ban on junk food advertising, but in introducing it, we should make sure that liability for mistakes and failures to comply with regulations is fair. The Bill as it stands is not. I am very grateful to the Minister for the time she has given to hearing these arguments, but urge her to reconsider the merits of these amendments, especially bearing in mind that we are still a long way from new legislation that will finally level the playing field across the media sector. If my noble friend divides the House, I will vote with him.

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, I too am very pleased to support Amendment 151A and the following amendments. I also read the letter from the noble Lord, Lord Kamall, to Peers following the debate on this in Committee. He said that it was

“difficult for regulators to keep pace with advertising code breaches without the cooperation of platforms who hold significant data on the process, and host the services”.

That seems to me a recognition of their responsibility in the ad process. As the noble Lord, Lord Black, said, ads create the vast majority of the platforms’ revenue and so they are responsible for controlling their content.

I read a recent survey on the effect of online advertising on young people, which was carried out by the healthy living charity, Global Action Plan. It showed that the average teen sees on Instagram alone one ad every eight seconds. That is the equivalent of 444 ads per hour. The survey also revealed that Facebook’s ad manager directly targeted young people with risky and unhealthy advertising, including for fast food and alcohol. It was the platforms’ data and algorithms which directed these ads, and they need to be made responsible for any restrictions on HFSS advertising as quickly as possible. There are other, more insidious forms of online advertising, such as product placement in digital content, especially among influencers. All these should be made the responsibility of the platforms to control. I hope the amendments will do just that.

I was glad to hear that the Government are looking at the online advertising programme, but I, like many noble Lords, am concerned by the laggardly start. Can the Minister say when she thinks the consultation will conclude? I hope that will happen quickly, because every day, thousands of young people are going to be harmed by the delay. I also ask the Minister to guarantee that platform liability for hosting product placement and others sorts of insidious advertising will be in scope of the consultation.

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, at this late hour, I simply want to express my support for the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and Amendments 154 and 155 in his name by making three simple points. First, we are learning all the time about the importance of nutrition and health. We are also understanding increasingly how poor nutrition can have a devastating effect on recovery and health inequality. It is therefore remarkable that in both hospitals and, more particularly, care homes we have no standards or training for the people involved in the preparation and delivery of food. That is a serious omission.

Therefore, it is time for us to move away from the traditional way in which care catering has developed, which is by scandal and omission, turning it round into a positive by developing new standards of training. We also need to try to get particularly teachers in colleges to get young people to understand that catering in care settings is far more complex then catering in restaurants. Within the NHS we have the opportunity to drive some world-beating standards on nutrition and care, and that is all that we are asking for by asking for this framework and these amendments.