Queen’s Speech

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lord, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, and I was very pleased to hear about the Welsh dairy farmers. As far as I know, Stoke Newington was an area where the milk for London used to be produced and where the cows lived.

Although it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, the Queen’s Speech was certainly not a pleasure to hear on my area of passion, which is our food system. As ever with the Government, there was little to do with food policy and our need to change. Every day, we hear stories about how our food system does not work. Take the first thing of the day—breakfast. Every day, 1.8 million children are at risk of starting the day hungry. Hungry children cannot concentrate. They miss out on hours of valuable learning. By the time they leave school, children eligible for free school meals are, on average, 19.3 months behind their wealthier peers. This is data recently collected from Magic Breakfast. This is not just gross inequality; it is also economic madness. It is certainly not unlocking our children’s full potential.

Children from the poorest households also struggle to eat healthily, which in part explains why children with severe obesity are four times more likely to live in deprived areas than in less deprived areas. The Chief Medical Officer’s report two weeks ago told us about the devastating consequences of childhood obesity, to which other noble Lords have referred. There are 100 new cases of childhood type 2 diabetes every year. There are 650,000 children with fatty liver disease and 90,000 children eligible for bariatric surgery, of whom less than 10 get the operations every year. Sally Davies was right to say this is a blatant contravention of children’s right to health.

Food is not only fundamental to health; it is also fundamental to the climate emergency. Currently, a third of greenhouse gas emissions derive from deforestation, as we grow palm oil for processed food and cut down rainforests to grow soy to feed livestock—possibly the most inefficient way of obtaining proteins that we could manage. It drives species extinction, as well as ill health.

Yet, in the gracious Speech, there was silence on all of this. The Agriculture Bill, which is making its way through Parliament very slowly—after the news tonight, I have no idea when it might arrive here, so I would be grateful if any noble Lord has a clue—concentrates a lot on the environmental goods that farmers need to provide. It promises public funds for public goods and nobody wants to disagree with that, but we need this Bill to help support farmers to deliver health goods as well.

Support for the horticulture sector is a case in point. Much neglected by the common agricultural policy, we could grow a great deal more of our fruit and veg in the UK. With the right mix of marketing and demand-side incentives, including public procurement, we could help our farmers improve our diets. It is a staggering fact that, for every one of your five a day you eat, your risk of early mortality decreases by 5%. Yet, according to the Food Foundation, of which I am a trustee, 30% of our children eat no vegetables at all, unless you count chips from McDonald’s.

Food is an incredibly complicated area. We need much more than the right support for farmers. Food is in almost every ministry; it touches health, trade and the environment—right across the board—and we have not, since the war, had a national food strategy. But one is being worked on right now, and I am very proud to say that I am an adviser on it. Over in Defra, Henry Dimbleby and a fantastic team are pulling together a strategy that will bring all these different elements together to try to give us a food system that really is fit for purpose and works for the future. It is so important that every noble Lord in this place supports it. We must not let this golden opportunity pass; we need to start debating all these key issues.

“Business as usual” is no longer good enough. Our food system runs, basically, for profit, like our agriculture system. It does not run to protect our health or the environment. In my years running the London Food Board—eight of them for our current Prime Minister and two of them for Mayor Sadiq Khan—I used to say, “Every day in London, we dish up 30 million meals”. As anyone who knows it can be quite difficult dishing up dinner for two, 30 million is mind-boggling. I understand why it is very hard for politicians to get their heads around this. It truly is awesome. But if we carry on with our small piecemeal policies and relying on the wonders of companies such as Magic Breakfast, which feeds 48,000 children every day through charity and raising money, then we really only have ourselves to blame for an environmental crisis and a health crisis, both of which could be prevented.

I would like the Minister to assure me that, whatever happens—I understand that she or anyone else is probably not in the position to give a definite answer to this—that her Government will continue to support the work of the food strategy and, hopefully, usher it into life, regardless of who sits in No. 10.

Restaurants: Calorie Labelling

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Tuesday 9th July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford]

Based on the weather, I cannot really answer that, but I absolutely reject the premise that the Government are losing their grip on this issue. We have seen some real successes since the publication of the 2016 plan. The soft drinks levy has resulted in the equivalent of 45 million kilograms of sugar being taken out of soft drinks, which is a genuine success. Some products in the sugar reduction programme have exceeded their first-year targets: a 6% reduction in sugar in yoghurts has been achieved. As I mentioned, significant investments are being made in schools to promote physical activity and healthy eating. We accept, however, given the obesity crisis, that much more needs to be done and the noble Baroness will be glad to hear that the Secretary of State has, as I said, commissioned the CMO to urgently review and drive this agenda forward, which is exactly what we intend to do.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I urge the Government to follow up on the point of the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, about how many of these places are small companies. When I ran the London Food Board, we did research in Tower Hamlets and I found one single takeaway where a portion of chips—a large one, admittedly—was 1,800 calories. That is completely insane, and parents and children do not know about it. I would be grateful to hear the Government’s view on how we might publicise that fact.

[Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford]

I thank the noble Baroness for her point. As I said, we remain committed to exploring what additional opportunities leaving the EU presents for food labelling. At the moment, we have some world-leading simple nutritional information, but we want to work with the devolved nations and Administrations to explore the potential for common approaches. Obviously, the consultation on mandated calorie labelling has received a high level of interest—there were over 1,000 responses—and that is partly why we are in the process of going through that at the moment.

Children: Oral Health

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Tuesday 12th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford]

I thank the noble Baroness for her question. I shall write to her on the exact amount of investment, but there are some reassuring figures coming forward: 77% of all five year-olds now have no visible decay, compared to 69% in 2008; there has been a fall in the number of extractions per 100,000 finished consultant episodes for the first time in the last decade; and more children accessed dentistry over the last year. All this is reassuring and we are committed to improving access and equality of access to dental care—that is what the Children’s Oral Health Improvement Programme Board, led by PHE, is intended to do. It brings together 20 stakeholder organisations specifically focused on oral health. There is a significant amount of activity targeting exactly the issue the noble Baroness raises.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, children get tooth decay because they eat too much sugar and too many sweets. How far are the Government getting with the commitments they made in chapter 2 of the obesity plan to restrict advertising of high-sugar products on TV before the watershed, and price and location promotions in supermarkets?

[Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford]

The noble Baroness is exactly right, in that improving children’s oral health is a wider picture: it is about not just access to dentistry but a preventive approach, which is a core government priority. This is exactly why we introduced the children’s obesity plan, one aspect of which is a consultation on advertising. Proposals on that will be brought forward shortly.

Human Fertilisation and Embryology: Frozen Eggs Storage

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Wednesday 20th February 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford]

I would never argue with the noble Lord, Lord Patel, on any scientific matter. My information is that there was no scientific or biological basis for the 10-year limit. It was based on debate and discussion of societal, ethical and cultural considerations, and on the concern that without a maximum limit, there would be questions about storage banks. Vitrification techniques are far more effective now than the slow-freezing techniques, so it is appropriate that these scientific questions are taken into account as this remains under review in the department.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, is this not just a case of discrimination? Practically every man in this room could still father a child, but none of the women could. This is very similar to when the pill was brought into our lives. This is about extending women’s rights to their fertility, women’s rights to work and women’s rights to plan their lives. As we have heard from many noble Lords, the science is with us; it is only the culture and the politics that are against us.

[Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford]

I have a great deal of sympathy with the position the noble Baroness has just presented. As I say, the 10-year limit remains under review but I do not think that replacing it through regulation in the simple way the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, suggested would be appropriate. It would need to be dealt with in primary legislation and we would need to make time for that in the House. At the moment, that is not a realistic prospect.

Childhood Obesity

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Thursday 13th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord O’Shaughnessy]

I absolutely recognise the problem that the noble Baroness has pointed out. The prevalence of childhood obesity doubles between the least deprived and the most deprived areas. The Government are committed to reducing that deprivation gap and taking a broad range of actions to combat poverty, none more so than making sure that everybody has the chance to work, which is why we have more people in employment than has ever been the case.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, following that point, more than a quarter of year 6 children in the most deprived areas are now obese, compared with just 11% in our richest communities. Poorer people cannot afford the Government’s Eatwell plate. What will the Government do post Brexit? Every document I have read has promised rises of between 4% and 20% in food prices and not one has said that food will get cheaper. We already know that we have a deep problem here. What are the Government doing to help, whether through Early Start, by subsidising fruit and vegetable consumption, or through doctor prescribing, to ensure that poorer children can get the food they need to ensure that they do not become—looking at it economically—a time bomb for us later?

[Lord O’Shaughnessy]

The noble Baroness is quite right about the scale of the problem. It is worth pointing out that obesity and overweight issues cost the NHS alone £5 billion a year. There are two parts to the answer. First, the Government are making sure that plans are in place to ensure the continuity of food supply as we leave the EU, whatever the outcome of the negotiations. Secondly, there are two aspects to her key points: about £26 million is going into breakfast clubs as a result of the sugar levy, and of course free fruit and veg are available to young children in primary school.

Antimicrobial Resistance

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Thursday 25th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord O’Shaughnessy]

I do not know specifically about pigs, although in my briefing there was a quote from Pig World, which is not a periodical I read very often. Antibiotic use in the veterinary environment has gone down by 40%. It is one of the big successes of the strategy.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, today the European Parliament is voting to ban all prophylactic use of antibiotics in farming, which will mean that they can no longer routinely be fed to groups. While British farmers have done magnificently in reducing antibiotics, I gather that the UK’s Veterinary Medicine Directorate is not minded to adopt this ban. Can I have an assurance from the Government that, in any new legislation now and post Brexit, a total ban on prophylactic use will be installed and that food standards will be maintained so that, if we ever start taking American meat imports, we will not accept them because of their unacceptable use of antibiotics?

[Lord O’Shaughnessy]

I join the noble Baroness in congratulating farmers on fantastic action in reducing the use of antibiotics. The specific issue the noble Baroness asked about is in the competence of Defra, so I will have to speak to my colleagues in that department about their opinion on the prophylactic use of antibiotics. On food standards, we have some of the highest food standards and animal welfare standards in the world, as the noble Baroness knows, and we have no intention of lowering them in any trade deal.

Personal Social Care: Funding

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Tuesday 16th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

I completely agree with my noble friend. It is right that we have a sustainable system that delivers what it says it will.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

Do the Government have any plans to reintroduce a proper meals-on-wheels service? When I worked for the City of London, it came to light that only five boroughs were left providing a rudimentary service, yet malnutrition and dehydration are among the main reasons why old people go into hospital. So we save 15 quid a day maximum and end up with a £700-a-day bed from which you cannot go home. The simple provision of a meal would be both humane and healthy.

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

The noble Baroness makes an excellent point. I do not know about the distribution of such services, but she is absolutely right that what everybody wants—the cared-for person and those looking after them—is to stay in their homes and remain independent for as long as possible, which is why so much more care must be delivered in the home. I will write to her on the specifics of meals-on-wheels services.

In Vitro Fertilisation: 40th Anniversary

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Thursday 13th September 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for bringing this anniversary to our attention and congratulate her on the incredibly valuable work that she has done. I was pleased, not surprised and slightly saddened to learn about another unknown, unsung heroic feminist scientist. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, for bringing her to my attention.

Forty-six years ago, I was a co-founder the feminist magazine Spare Rib. We were a great deal more worried about not getting pregnant at that point than about getting pregnant. We were right in the early years of the pill, the cap and the coil, and all the extraordinary things to do with contraception rather than conception. None of us had any children and we were woeful in dealing with the issue of how one might be a member of the women’s lib, as we were then, as well as being a mother. But I remember clearly some of my older friends who had worked and then tried to get pregnant in their 30s. For a particular friend to whom I was very close, it just failed and she hit her early 40s and had no children. We were only just six years before this quite extraordinary scientific development hit the world and, suddenly, the prospect of what it could mean for you as a woman to be able not only to have contraception but to be helped with conception when you needed it. It was a staggeringly wonderful invention.

It has done so many things for our lives and our times. As was mentioned by others, we have redefined to a great extent what it means to be a family: a family is about one or two loving adults of either sex bringing up a child that they greatly want. It has been babies born to same-sex partners and babies born to single women who have given up on ideas about how to find Mr Right. It is nothing short of a miracle and it is not an overestimation to say that it has changed not only the way we make babies but the family. A recent Cambridge University study showed that children raised by same-sex couples do just as well as those raised in heterosexual marriages. It is not a matter of the structure; it is a matter of the love.

However, I have concerns. Like many things in our world, access to IVF has all too often become the privilege of the rich, despite recommendations from NICE that all women who are over 30 and have been trying for two years or more to have a baby should be entitled to three cycles of IVF on the NHS. These decisions are made by local CCGs. As a result, only 12% of them currently offer those three cycles. IVF, like many things, has fallen victim to a postcode lottery. Can it be in any way true that your income should determine your right to be a parent?

We live in a society where we believe that everything we might desire will be available if only we can scratch up the money, but the promises that IVF clinics make to women are fulfilled in only 21% of cases. Forty years on from this extraordinary breakthrough, does it seem ethical that we allow clinics to trade on human desperation, turning what should be an altruistic medical invention into a gold-mine for the very few?

I know that we have strict laws around surrogacy in this country, but it also concerns me that very wealthy people can outsource gestation, increasingly these days to poor women overseas who will literally rent out their womb for a nine-month period. About 15 years ago, I had a television series and interviewed a very rich man. He was single, gay and, as Jane Austen would have said, in possession of a considerable fortune, but he was lacking something, and that something, he thought, was a child. I watched and filmed as he found an egg from a website in California—the donor was a six-foot tall Stanford graduate with long blond hair; he was a very small, dark-haired man. He got a womb from a different organisation, also online, and he flew over to Los Angeles for a week to deposit his sperm. Around nine months later, he was flying back to London with triplets. It was apparently quite tricky getting the passports, but they now reside somewhere in Hampshire.

His surrogate and the egg donor were extremely well paid; they were women who knew what they were doing and were apparently completely content with the arrangement. But it worries me: is it morally justified? Does it matter that a child’s biological origin is obscured by so many different routes, a bit like an offshore bank account? Only time will tell. These developments are happening faster than we can debate and consider them morally. Or does it again come back to money and being able to do what you want with it?

Women the world over are being sexually exploited and victimised through war, slavery and trafficking, and one of the consequences of this technology should never be an extra reason to exploit extremely vulnerable women who set themselves up to say, “I will rent my womb”. It is exactly the same as the illegal trade in kidneys—at least I think it is.

My final concern is what this has done for men. One of the things I think we got wrong in the early days of feminism was to say to blokes, “We want your jobs. We want to be in the boardroom, in the law courts, standing in front of university students, in politics, and what we would like you to have of our lot is the cooking, the ironing and the childcare”. It was not really a very intelligent trade. The end result is that roles for women have expanded enormously—we can be all those things—but I believe that it is still very difficult for men to be fathers, because as a society we do not put enough credit where that credit is due. It worries me that men, when it comes to IVF, are pretty much left out of the picture. They deposit their deposit and then they go on and hope for the best. I would hate to see this extraordinary science in some way devaluing fatherhood. Fatherhood is fantastically important to children and to men, and we should make sure in all this debate that we remember that it is just as important as motherhood.

Obesity

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Wednesday 18th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, first I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord McColl, for this debate, which has enabled me to make my maiden speech so early, and to noble Lords for their kind words and welcome. I am incredibly honoured to stand here before you today. The first thing I would like to say is how very grateful I am to everyone from all parts of the House for their kindness towards me, to the noble Baronesses, Lady Kennedy and Lady Jenkin, who introduced me, and to my noble friend Lady Kidron who has been such a splendid mentor. I will always be very grateful to all the people who work in this amazing building for showing me where to go, providing a welcoming smile and always making me feel, literally from the moment I walked in, really welcome and at home.

After a long career, which has included founding a feminist magazine Spare Rib when I was 21 and editing three national newspapers, in 2008 I accepted the post of chair of the London Food Board, working first for Boris Johnson and then for Sadiq Khan. For the past decade, all aspects of food have been central to my life and my professional life: food policy; food poverty; urban food growing; the effects of the way we eat and grow food on climate change; children’s holiday hunger; animal welfare; and—you name it—very much so, obesity.

Life does not happen without food. Its construction is a miracle. We are all ultimately powered by plants, which in turn are powered by the sun. Food builds our bodies and provides our daily fuel, and what nature gives us is precisely calibrated to enable us to thrive. No one in this building or in this country would dream of filling the tank of their precious Ferrari with Coca-Cola, yet we are happy to fill the world’s most complex machine—the human body, the bodies of our little babies—with weird, highly processed junk which bears scant relationship to what I would call food. Yes, of course, it is tasty. It is tasty beyond belief. It is salty, sugary and spicy. I am far from immune, but this availability has triggered a health crisis which is, across the world, spinning out of control.

Food-related disease is now the world’s number one killer, but it is not so just as a result of heart disease and cancers. Bad diets lead to obesity which means living with ill health for much of your life, and it is sadly the poorest in our society who carry the biggest burden here. Diabetes, one of the possible outcomes of obesity, is not a pretty disease; it leads to lost limbs, loss of energy and kidney failure. Twenty limbs are amputated every day in this country as a result of diabetes. Did you know that last year in Vietnam they chopped off more limbs than they did at the height of the Vietnam War because of diabetes?

For me, obesity is not an individual problem. We are quick to blame the individual as a fat failure, but all the evidence points to the culprit being the ready availability of high-fat, high-sugar foods—foods that overwhelm the impulse control of children, young adults and adults, which are packaged and promoted to create the impression that they are fun, cool and life-enhancing. Many are placed in shops where children are bound to encounter them: at the tills and at grasping height. If noble Lords need further evidence, in this country 99.8% of advertisers’ budgets is spent on what I would call unhealthy food and only 1.2% on fruit and vegetables.

Changing diets can completely transform health outcomes in lots of ways. It is time for an integrated approach to food policy with it no longer being sectioned out to different departments. We must recognise that the huge burden that is being placed on the National Health Service, which other noble Lords have referred to, could be lifted if we all ate better. It is not just about obesity. One of the things that shocked me when I was chair of the London Food Board was to discover that, in this great city of ours, one of the prime reasons that the elderly go into hospital in London is malnutrition and dehydration. So a council saves—let us be generous here—£15 a day on a meals-on-wheels and a person ends up in a high dependency £600-a-night hospital bed. This is because of cuts. Councils cannot afford it. Why can we not rethink this system? One pot of money. We all deserve to eat well.

I am both humbled and very excited to be amid so many of you who care so much about a subject that I care so much about. I hope that by adding to your number, I can add to your strength. We can, through food policy, achieve a better world—one that is fairer, that calls a halt to the inequalities that we see now where the poorest in our society are not only condemned to poorer lives, but all too often to poorer health outcomes. I know that food lies at the heart of many of the problems we need to fix, but it is also the route to so many of the solutions where everyone, whatever their background, can enjoy a good life, made possible through good food. It is my privilege and my pleasure to join your Lordships to work to that positive outcome.