Food (Promotion and Placement) (England) Regulations 2021 Debate

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Department: Department of Health and Social Care

Food (Promotion and Placement) (England) Regulations 2021

Baroness Brinton Excerpts
Tuesday 23rd November 2021

(2 years, 5 months ago)

Grand Committee
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My final, brief third question is this. How will whoever is going to enforce these regulations, whether it is trading standards or environmental health officers, be resourced to enforce these complicated and important new laws?
Baroness Brinton Portrait Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]
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My Lords, I declare an interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I thank the Minister for his introduction to these regulations. The comments of the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe, as chair of the APPG on obesity, were particularly helpful.

These regulations sit behind recently revealed alarming figures showing that nearly a quarter of children are overweight or obese when they start primary school. That figure has risen to a third by the time they leave at 11. The Government are right to be concerned about the overconsumption of food and drink high in calories, sugar and fat, which leads to obesity and associated obesity illnesses. I will come on to the regulations shortly, but from these Benches we want to make two other comments.

First, the Conservatives in government have consistently cut public health budgets to local authorities over the last six years. The King’s Fund says that, on a like-for-like basis, the 2019-20 budget is 15% less than that of 2013-14, including a more than 5% cut to obesity services. In addition, the reduction in school nurses as well as health visitors over the last decade has meant that some of the vital early face-to-face advice on nutrition to parents of young children has gone.

Worse, some of the excellent work done by chefs such as Jamie Oliver and by the campaign of Henry Dimbleby—both of whom over the years encouraged much healthier eating in schools—has been reduced if not lost. In fact, recent reports say that high-fat, high-carbohydrate foods such as the dreaded turkey twizzler are re-emerging on to school menus.

The second issue from these Benches is the decline in fitness of our primary school children. This has been a long-standing problem, but the sale of playing fields and focus in the curriculum on core subjects have all led to a reduction of time when children can exercise, take up sports and essentially get the habit early, which will also impact on their weight. This January, Sport England noted that children’s activity levels were down in 2019-20—pre pandemic—with only 44% of children and young people meeting the Chief Medical Officer’s guidelines on taking part in sport and physical activity for an average of 60 minutes a day. Now is the perfect time, as restrictions have been relaxed, to increase the time that young children can undertake sports and exercise. Can the Minister say what influence the Department of Health and Social Care has with the Secretary of State for Education in remedying this matter and what plans there are to fund more opportunities for young children to participate in sport and exercise?

Turning to the regulations, I note that this follows a decade of trying to encourage large supermarkets to reduce salt and sugar in their own direct products, as well as encouraging their suppliers to reformulate. However, not all of them have achieved enough, nor have they changed their attitudes towards promotions.

If the Grand Committee will permit me an anecdote, one of my adult children used to work as a buyer for a major supermarket, and its department had been asked to go back to suppliers to ask them to reduce sugar, salt and fat. My son was responsible for, among other things, dairy products. Most products and many suppliers were happy to work with the supermarket to achieve reductions, but both sides were completely stumped by one product: brandy butter. It has not just sugar and fat, but alcohol too. On this occasion, it was agreed there was very little they could achieve, other than to highlight its very red traffic light and recognise that it was a truly seasonal product that was not part of people’s everyday habits. But it is good they were thinking about it.

While the public health responsibility deal has improved matters a little bit, it is not nearly enough. One key area remains obvious. That is the influence of promotions targeted at children and their parents, both in store and on television. Other speakers have referred to multibuys, end-of-carousel promotions and queuing eye-catchers—far too often, junk food and sweets. While the public health responsibility deal has helped a bit in those larger supermarkets, it is certainly not enough, and it is good that healthier choices will be much more visible in shops and that buy one, get one free and three-for-two offers on high fat, sugar and salt products will be restricted.

On food scope, it was worrying to read in the past few days that a high level of juice in baby and toddler food, which has a very high fructose content, is not labelled as high sugar because the juice is natural and not added, processed sugar. Most parents of babies and small children believe that such products are not high in sugar. Surely, this needs to be added to the formulation list for HFSS products. Is the department looking at this?

It is right that environmental health food authorities should be responsible for enforcing this in localities, but I ask, as others have, whether there will be extra funding for environmental health to be able to carry this out. We need to remember that members of environmental health have many other responsibilities too, including the vital role during the pandemic of test and trace, working with local resilience forums. The Government cannot keep loading extra responsibilities on to beleaguered local authorities without funding them properly. Will there be funding for this for the enforcement bodies?

From these Benches, we regret that the food sector has not responded well enough to remove the need for this regulation, but we believe that the long-term health implications for our children are being damaged by current custom and practice. But this cannot be done without other actions too: funding more sport and exercise opportunities and funding enforcement are just two critical elements. The minimum of another five years to implementation, as outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe, is too slow. Can the Minister please ensure that these changes are speeded up?

Baroness Merron Portrait Baroness Merron (Lab)
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My Lords, I appreciate the intent behind these regulations and thank the Minister for his introduction to them. I want to comment on the current situation and raise a number of questions following on from those that we have already heard, because I feel that it is the detail of the regulations that is wanting rather than what they are about.

To emphasise the points that have already been made in this debate and have been heard in your Lordships’ House on many occasions, the UK has among the highest childhood obesity rates in western Europe. One in four children is overweight or obese when starting primary school, and the number is one in three by the time a young person gets to secondary school. These children are obviously more likely to become obese adults—let us remind ourselves that, at present, one in four adults is obese—and therefore at greater risk of conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, fatty liver disease, cancers and mental ill-health. As we know, the situation is worse in poorer communities. Indeed, one in three adults in the most deprived areas is obese, compared with one in five in the least deprived—a clear inequality if ever we saw one. The discrepancy among children is even more alarming: more than twice as many children are obese in the most deprived communities as in the least, and that gap has nearly doubled under this Government.

There is no doubt that in-store promotions are incredibly effective in influencing what we buy. Research shows that we buy 20% more than we intended when faced by promotions. Cancer Research UK has shown that greater volumes of high fat, sugar and salt are likely to be purchased by those who are already overweight or living with obesity, so we see a correlation between promotions and obesity, and it is right that these regulations seek to tackle that. So, yes, it is right to take action to address this situation, not by limiting people’s freedom of choice but instead by supporting them to make healthier choices.

However, these regulations alone will not be enough, and it is this point that I want to emphasise to the Minister. We need a radical obesity strategy that goes much further, ensures that families are able to access healthy food and supported local leisure facilities, and ensures that poverty can be tackled. Without that, there will be no levelling up. All we will see is a continuing widening of the already considerable gap between those who have the means to manage their weight and those who do not.