Food, Diet and Obesity Committee Report

Baroness Suttie Excerpts

Friday 28th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Suttie (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate my noble friend Lady Walmsley on both her extremely powerful speech and her excellent chairing of the committee. It was a genuine pleasure to serve on that committee and to learn a lot. Anybody who knows my noble friend will know that she is both firm and fair as a chair; she also has a tremendous grasp of the detail. She has made some extremely powerful points this morning and I hope that the Minister will respond in a more encouraging way than appeared evident in the official and hugely disappointing government response to this report. I also place on record my personal thanks to the secretariat of the committee, in particular to Stuart and Lucy, who were truly exceptional.

As a child of the 1970s and a teenager of the 1980s growing up in Scotland, I grew up through a revolution in food production in this country. Growing up in the 1970s, I remember food as predominantly homemade and wholesome, if slightly bland. It was an era, as a dear friend of mine used to say, when we were blessed with “freedom from choice.” By the time I was at high school in the 1980s, industrially produced foods and ready meals were beginning to appear, along with the invention of the domestic microwave. Multinational fast-food outlets began to multiply in our cities. As a student, I clearly remember always feeling strangely dissatisfied after eating a McDonald’s burger. Although it was cheap, it always left me feeling hungry afterwards and immediately wanting another.

At that time, I was unaware that industrial research had specifically and quite deliberately produced that effect, so that customers like me consumed more. Following my time on this committee, I now understand that what I was experiencing as a student is called hyper-palatability. But whereas in the 1970s and 1980s, ultra-processed food might have been an occasional treat, nowadays, tragically, in some parts of the UK, it makes up to 80% of people’s diets.

We are all faced with an enormous choice of food outlets, from takeaways to supermarkets, Deliveroo and Uber Eats. Children, in particular, are bombarded daily by food offers and advertising encouraging them to buy and eat much more than they need. This food revolution has had a profound impact on children. They have grown up with an abundance of artificial and industrially produced foods, and some have little or no experience of natural or home-cooked food.

The statistics are stark and becoming worse. In the UK, over 20% of children are already too heavy and around 10% are already obese when they start primary school. As the Food Foundation’s most recent report states, children in the most deprived fifth of the population are over twice as likely to be living with obesity as those in the least deprived fifth by their first year of school. A few weeks ago, on a four-hour train journey back from Scotland, I watched as a mother fed her toddler three little plastic sachets of fruit puree. Misleadingly, these fruit sachets are marketed as a health product. The mother no doubt thought that she was giving her child a healthy option, but just one of those sachets contains the recommended daily allowance of sugar for an adult. It is surely wrong that our shops can sell baby foods and drinks that are packed full of sugar but have no traffic light warning or label on them.

The same applies to so-called follow-on and growing-up milk. For example, a one or two year-old consuming Alpro soya growing-up milk—which states on the pack that it is low in sugars—would typically be consuming over three times the recommended maximum total daily sugars intake from that product alone. Does the Minister not agree that warning labels about sugar content on children’s food products are urgently needed? The noble Baroness, Lady Brown of Silvertown, made the case so very powerfully that provision of a healthy school meal in early years can have an extremely positive impact on behaviour and concentration in class. It can also encourage healthy eating and good nutrition habits at a young age.

A healthy and nutritious hot meal is nearly always going to be healthier than a packed-lunch option, which is often full of ultra-processed products. A friend’s nine year-old daughter, Livia, recently told me that she was deeply concerned by what her schoolmates were eating on a daily basis. During the public hearings for this committee, we heard the experiences of many young people; they really do care about these issues. There have been rumours surrounding cuts in the provision of school meals. I would be grateful if the Minister could clarify the Government’s plan regarding school meals.

The Government’s response, or lack of response, to the very concrete and constructive suggestions on children, young people, infants and school meals in chapters 6 and 7 of this report are deeply disappointing. Investing in a healthy start for our children makes sound economic sense, as other noble Lords have said. Robert Boyle, a paediatrician from Imperial College, says that obesity is the greatest health crisis on the planet and that it often starts with childhood. We need to take firm action now.