Food: Regulation and Guidance

Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town Excerpts

Thursday 7th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

My Lords, I welcome this debate and congratulate my noble friend on having made it available for us today. I also pay tribute to his work. I had the great privilege of serving under his chairmanship of the National Consumer Council, and since then I have watched him develop that organisation into what has become the very successful Consumer Focus—a body which, as he said, works in this and a number of other areas. Its great success is a testament to his work in the very many areas in which he has been involved.

It is fairly obvious that nutrition is very good for individuals, but it is also very good for society. A healthy population learns better at school, it works better and it plays better. That is good for our economy and it is good for individuals. The public expenditure saving, particularly in the health service, is one which I should hope the Government are taking an interest in and, therefore, doing more to promote.

We have seen in this country a long-term interest in the quality of what we eat and drink, which includes the Fabians’ early work on cleaner water. Safe food was perhaps regulated much earlier than other areas of our lives, and more recently there has been regulation on the labelling and promotion of healthy options. However, all of that works only if it has the confidence of all the parties concerned, including the Government, the producers of food, the distributers of food, the doctors and public health specialists and, above all, the consumers. That brings us to the key question of how food standards and nutrition are to be regulated such that the consumer is absolutely sure that the consumer interest is at the heart of regulation. As my noble friend mentioned, we have already learned the lessons of what happened when the beef farmers denied any problem with their stock and when the Government sought to reassure or advise the public—it did not work. Parents want to know that their child’s health does not depend on a politician with many other interests to balance deciding the content of the dinner plate. Nor will parents necessarily believe the advice given out by politicians—sad though that may be to believe. Parents want guidance and rules to be determined in a way that puts child health and welfare above any other consideration.

That point is fundamental to all types of regulation, whether in financial services, in medicine, in legal services—I must declare an interest as chair of the Legal Services Consumer Panel—or in the regulation of actuarial work, on which I must also declare an interest as a member of the Board for Actuarial Standards. The great success of good regulation—what is admired by other countries that look at our UK regulation—comes where the end-user is at the heart of regulation. It is never in the consumer’s interest to regulate unnecessarily, but where market failures arise due to the lack either of information or of opportunities to shop around or, as perhaps in this case, because there is too long a production chain so that the consumer cannot influence the market, regulation is needed to protect the consumer and to give advice and guidance. That is as much the case in food as in financial or legal services. I hope that the Minister will reassure the House that consumer protection will remain the Government’s watchword as they take over responsibility for nutrition from the FSA and, indeed, elsewhere in their regulatory role. We want to hear from the Government that consumers will be part of the dialogue on policy development and that consumer trust in our food—both in the quality of the food and in its nutritional value—can, therefore, continue and, indeed, increase.

In closing these very short remarks, I will take up my noble friend’s comments about our having come to the end of the era of cheap food. I take his word on that point. That being the case, let me end by asking the Minister about the impact on, for example, a widow with six children, given the Government’s proposed cap of £500 a week on her income. What impact will that have on the nutritional standards and thus the health of her six children?