Children and Young People: Obesity

Baroness Thornton Excerpts

Tuesday 17th April 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, for initiating this debate and for her patience—she has got it at last. I thank all noble Lords for their contributions, and I thank the many organisations that have sent us briefings about this important subject: the LGA, the BMA, Diabetes UK, Cancer Research UK, the Faculty of Dental Surgery, the Daily Mile and the Obesity Health Alliance. As other noble Lords have mentioned, we also received one late today from the Advertising Association, which seemed to make the argument that there is no need to have a ban on high-fat, salt and sugar advertising before the watershed at 9 pm because there is no evidence that it would have any impact. As someone who proposed a Private Member’s Bill about 10 years ago saying exactly the opposite to that, I am afraid that, like the noble Baroness, I was not in sympathy with that argument. I am sorry if I have left anyone out of the thanks for all the briefings that we have received. This amount of interest seems to be a sign that people recognise that there is a health emergency that our children and young people face.

The House of Commons Select Committee March 2017 follow-up to its 2015 report tracked the action, or inaction, of government in tackling the problem of child obesity. It commented on the Government’s child obesity plan that was published in 2016, which, like many noble Lords here, we found disappointingly modest, given the proposals of the 2015 Select Committee. It showed a lack of urgency that I am afraid is still apparent.

I am not going to repeat all the facts that many noble Lords have mentioned, but the fact that 30% of our children are overweight or obese and many will remain that way into adulthood is not good. And yet, in 2016 UNICEF estimated that 10% of children in the UK are living in severe food insecurity, which means that they do not have enough to eat. Frank Field’s Hungry Holidays report estimated that as many as 3 million children could be at risk of going hungry over the school holidays. I am sure that your Lordships will recall that at a recent teachers’ conference we heard reports of grey-faced hungry children turning up at school who cannot learn because they have not eaten.

Food poverty and obesity coexist in some of our most deprived communities. Children living in the most deprived areas are more than twice as likely to be affected by obesity as those living in the least deprived areas. Families from deprived communities have the poorest diets, as noble Lords have mentioned, high in saturated fat and low in fruit, vegetables and fibre.

Can the Minister assure the House that the Government are taking a comprehensive approach to this issue, which is also about how to support parents to make the right choices, the right decisions? It is about ensuring that children can still have access to free school lunches. It is about looking at how families can afford decent food. As the noble Lord, Lord Storey, said, it is about Sure Start centres, it is about providing support in the communities where children are most at risk. If I may add, it is also about not selling off school playgrounds.

I was struck by the briefing we received from the LGA, because since the responsibility for delivering public health transferred to councils in 2015, local government has spent more than £1 billion tackling child and adult obesity and physical inactivity. Against a backdrop of reductions to the public health budget, councils report a 50% increase in spend in the years between 2013 and 2017 on childhood obesity and a 60% increase on childhood physical inactivity in the same period.

Surely it is counterproductive to continue to cut public health budgets in this context. Public Health England’s sugar reduction programme should be extended to include salt, saturated fat and overall calories. Is the Minister prepared to ensure that compliance with these targets should be regularly monitored and backed by meaningful sanctions for companies failing to make progress?

As many noble Lords have mentioned, the Government should close existing loopholes to restrict children’s exposure to junk food marketing across all the media to which they are exposed. The rules currently apply to only 26% of children’s viewing times and still allow adverts for food and drink high in fat, sugar and salt to be shown during family viewing time—between 6 and 9 pm—when the number of children watching TV is at its highest. These rules are failing to protect our children. They deserve to be protected from exposure to adverts for food and drink that we know can influence their food preferences, choices and intake.

The noble Baroness, Lady Mone, made a great speech about what needs to be done, but the point about her analogy with seatbelt usage is that we needed legal compulsion to make people wear seatbelts because they would not do it voluntarily and the car industry was not going to install them unless the law made it comply. If we are to follow that analogy, perhaps some lessons need to be learned about compulsion.

We need a comprehensive strategy that tackles all those issues. If we fail to have that, we fail a generation of children and young people, to great personal cost to them and great public cost. The noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, hit the nail on the head when she said that political leadership is what is required.