Obesity Strategy 2020

Andy Carter Excerpts

Thursday 27th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Andy Carter (Warrington South) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon). I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) on securing the debate.

There is no doubt that tackling obesity is one of the greatest long-term health challenges this country faces. Weight loss is an incredibly difficult challenge for so many people. I spent the first few months of this year on an enforced walking programme and managed to lose a stone in weight. Coming back to Westminster, I am afraid I can already feel it piling back on, but that personal responsibility that my right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) talked about earlier is so critical.

One reason I wanted to speak in this debate is that children in the most deprived parts of the country are more than twice as likely to be obese as their peers who live in wealthier areas. That is sowing the seeds of adult disease and health inequalities in early childhood. We do need an urgent strategy so I welcome many of the measures the Minister talked about earlier.

I think we all agree on the need to address issues around obesity. How we tackle it is what we need to debate and what we are debating today. I heard the Minister say that there is no silver bullet and I think she is absolutely right on that. However, I am afraid there are some bullets that can have wide-ranging impacts, some of them unintended. As a number of hon. Friends have raised, one proposal is a TV and digital advertising ban. While some suggestions appear straightforward, I think this is a very complicated issue. The Minister herself said that if advertising did not work, the companies concerned wouldn’t do it. She is absolutely right on that, but there is significant evidence to suggest that introducing a ban will not deliver the necessary beneficial impacts she wants and could have significant outcomes on the public good. The Government’s own evidence, as we have heard, shows that the reductions in calorific intake will be negligible—about 1.7 calories a day. I think it was referred to earlier as a Smartie; I would refer to it as a Tic Tac. It really is not a significant amount of calories on a daily basis. My call to the Minister, therefore, is to encourage further investment in education in this area.

I want to mention in particular the impact that a reduction in advertising or an ad ban would have on public service broadcasters such as ITV and Channel 4. Some data I have seen suggests that about £200 million a year would be taken out of that sector, which is almost three times the amount the broadcaster spends on regional news each year. Regional news is something we all benefit from. It is incredibly important and the impact on public service broadcasting would be significant. My drive is to encourage broadcasters to put more emphasis on the campaigns they have been working on recently, such as the “Eat them to Defeat Them” campaign to increase the amount of vegetables in shopping baskets—around 500 million child-sized portions because of joined-up thinking between broadcasters and retailers, and something that children want to get involved with.

To conclude, one issue that has concerned me greatly relates to press reports suggesting that the ad ban will not be introduced across all platforms. It could be that it is just on TV platforms, rather than online platforms such as YouTube. That is a recipe for disaster, because the money currently spent on TV channels that generate wealth for this country will simply go overseas to the US.