Obesity

Justin Tomlinson Excerpts

Wednesday 9th November 2011 Westminster Hall

[Justin Tomlinson (North Swindon) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for East Londonderry (Mr Campbell) on securing this very important debate. I echo many of the points that have been raised this afternoon, but I want to concentrate mainly on the childhood obesity angle. It was mentioned that a third of children are overweight, and that 85% of those will then go on to be obese in adulthood. I want to cover four topics: planning, food, sport and youth provision.

Gardens are a third of the size they were in the 1960s. Front gardens are often more of an aspiration than a reality in new build areas. I am keen that we make greater use of accessible and usable open space. Before becoming MP for North Swindon, I was for 10 years a councillor for a new build estate. I used to complain time and again that there was not sufficient usable and accessible open space, and I was told, “You are wrong. You have more open space than anywhere else in Swindon.” It transpired that that is because the definition of open space includes hedges and heritage sites, neither of which is suitable for a child to play football on, and that is something that needs to be considered.

I am not asking for premier league, standard turf right across all housing estates. When I was growing up, our open space was an almost vertical hill. The twins, Matthew and Paul Gilbert, who were technically gifted at football, got to kick the ball uphill all day long and myself and my friends got the advantage of kicking it downhill. Such is the creativity of young people.

Open and accessible spaces are very important. As a child, I was very sporty. I grew up in the 1980s when children were fuelled with artificial colourings and flavourings—the sort of things that we are now worried about. None the less, I had the balance because I spent all day running around. We copied the television, so mostly we played football. If the Ashes were on, out came the cricket bats. When it was the Tour de France, the bikes came out. When it was Wimbledon, we brought out the tennis rackets. Normally, we brought them out for only two weeks or for one or two days if we were following our British hopes.

I was also the lead council member for leisure. People always said to me, “The emphasis is on creating lots of really good leisure centres.” The reality is that youngsters go to leisure centres only once or twice a year—normally for somebody’s birthday party. It is the jumpers-for-goalposts mentality that matters. It is really important that we build in to developments usable and accessible open space.

It became fashionable to build new public buildings under the private finance initiative scheme. Ignoring the advantages or disadvantages of the scheme, there was a particular problem for local communities in that they could not afford to access those community facilities. Again I know, from my time as a councillor, that we had some wonderful open spaces behind very big fences and the local community could not afford to hire the sports clubs, so that is another issue that requires consideration.

Local authorities are always under pressure on funding. One of the areas that I would like to see prioritised is investment in local country parks. Families would use them and we would see jumpers for goalposts, family walks, people walking their dogs and all sorts of different free activities to get people going.

Councils can be innovative in this area. Let me give three examples from my own local authority. First, £1 million has been invested in Mouldon hill through section 106 money—nothing new there. We had £5 million invested in Lydiard park, of which £4 million came from the Heritage Lottery Fund and £1 million from local private businesses and organisations. The best one of all was the £2 million investment in Shaw forest, which was a tip. We charged neighbouring authorities to put their rubble on top of the tip and then we planted trees and now it is a very enjoyable country park in which to walk the dog.

There have already been some very good contributions on food, so I will just mention my particular bugbears. First, basic cookery in schools should be compulsory. Nowadays, too many people’s idea of cooking is a three-minute wait and then the ping of the microwave. As an MP I have visited a number of schools to see how they provide cookery lessons. I am a big supporter of the £20 million national lottery-funded “Let’s get cooking” campaign, which is coming to the end of its five-year scheme. I hope that it will carry on. The main function of the campaign is to encourage cooking in schools. Last Friday, I visited a cookery session at Warneford secondary school in Highworth. Boys and girls from different backgrounds joined in enthusiastically. Cooking is not a bind for young people; they want to do it and they enjoy doing it. With “Junior Masterchef” and all the other cookery programmes on TV, they are inspired to cook.

The children themselves made another point to me. A lot of professional sportspeople are the role models for young people. Because professional footballers, for example, only train for a couple of hours a day, they have to do something with the rest of their time and a lot of them now are very good chefs, which has filtered through to a lot of young people, particularly younger boys.

I have also visited Haydonleigh primary school, which had what to my mind is the perfect example of cookery in schools. In Haydonleigh’s cookery sessions, the parents or grandparents of children were invited to come in, so that they were cooking with the children, who would then take their skills back home. However, there was also an allotment at the school, so the children got to see the full cycle: they planted the seeds; they grew the vegetables; they cooked in school with their parents or grandparents; and they went home and carried on cooking.

In my role as the vice-chair of the all-party group on heart disease, I fully echo all the points that have been made about the need for clear and uniform labelling of food, which allows people to make informed decisions.

[Dr William McCrea (South Antrim) (DUP)]

Does the hon. Gentleman believe that GPs have a greater responsibility and need to be more proactive in informing people about, and leading people in, healthy eating?

[Justin Tomlinson]

Yes, I absolutely do, but this is an area where the schools can lead, in terms of teaching the basic cookery and giving students the information they need, and I am covering that.

Then there is food labelling. I want to refer to labelling here in Parliament, because people often say, “Does labelling really make much of a difference?” Well, we have the “traffic light” system in our canteens in Parliament. As a general rule, anything that has a red sticker next to it is normally the most attractive thing, but we are able—even we MPs, with our limited intelligence—to say, “I can’t have too many of those,” although I confess that, as I was writing this speech earlier, I was eating a pork pie. So I failed by that rule myself.

I turn to organised sports now. I have already said that the most important element is the open, accessible and usable space on which kids will be creative. But organised sport also plays a very important role and there are a lot of opportunities that we can examine, in order to be more proactive.

I set up a sports forum when I was a councillor and that forum brought together about 60 different sports groups, who shared best practice. For example, there would be one group saying, “We’ve got a facility, but it’s underused,” and there would be another group saying, “We haven’t got the facility, and we need one.” We put those two groups together and between them they became experts at applying for external funding. There are lots of examples of external funding and I will talk about one in a moment.

I was quite an outspoken critic of the plan to scrap the school sports partnerships scheme and I was delighted when the Government changed their mind and delayed the scrapping of the scheme by nine months, to allow the good and successful examples of school sports partnerships to dig in and secure their existence. The principle of the school sports partnerships in schools was not to deal with those children who are already technically gifted, because by and large if a child is naturally good at sport—probably because their parents encouraged them—they are usually already involved in competitive sports clubs. Instead, it was to deal with the three out of five kids who were not naturally inspired to participate in sport and to provide them with a menu of alternative sports, because there is something for everyone.

It is not only a question of getting people to be active. One of the biggest challenges that sports groups tell me about is that they would like to provide lots of facilities but are struggling to do so because they are struggling for volunteers, for example to join the administrative staff and coaching staff who do all sorts of things, such as filling in forms to make all the bookings, to provide the organisation so that the kids can take part in activities.

I will touch on the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire (Simon Hart) has made today, and in previous speeches, which is the need to address the cost of insurance. One of the barriers for a lot of schools is that many teachers are very young and it costs a fortune to insure a teacher to use a minibus. I have pleaded with several Ministers to consider providing some national insurance scheme for all different schools, so that they can achieve economies of scale and make the cost of insurance cheaper. In addition, health and safety issues prevent a number of schools from taking up more opportunities.

Councils should also do more to open up facilities. It is a crying shame that many of our facilities are closed on Friday and Saturday evenings. We are talking about tackling antisocial behaviour and childhood obesity. Where there are leisure centres that are shut, surely we should open their doors and provide facilities.

A good example of how that process works is that we have just had an academy built in the last few years in Swindon; an old school was closed down to build it. However, just before the decision was made to do that, £4 million was invested in a fantastic new sports hall in the old school. Initially and regrettably, the council was going to bulldoze the new sports hall along with the old school, because there was no point in having a random, stand-alone sports hall. Through the sports forum, however, we managed to identify a sports group that could take over that sports hall. It was Esprit Gymnastics and Mark Hows, who runs it, is fantastic at identifying funding opportunities. He had about 250 kids a week in his old facility, but that was at full capacity. However, he had an income, so he could pay a rental income to the council, which is revenue-stretched, and he said, “Just don’t bulldoze it. I will rent it.” Now his group has more than 500 kids a week participating, including potential Olympic athletes, and they are a real jewel in the crown for Swindon. That is a good example of the council being proactive and working through the sports forum to identify other facilities that can be used.

One of the external bodies that provide funding is the Football Foundation, which provides funding through its “Grow the Game” scheme. That scheme aims not only to increase participation but the sustainability of it. I have seen a lot of funding come in and people will put on a one-off session. That is great, but it does not really make that much difference. The “Grow the Game” scheme slants its funding to ensure that it is not just used for one-off things. It targets things such as coaching qualifications to provide additional coaches so that more junior clubs can take part, and paying for facility hire if there is a group of volunteers, particularly in challenging areas where there may not necessarily be a huge amount of funding. Also, first aid provision is funded, as part of the process of ticking off the many items on the very long health and safety list that exists. Already the sports forum has increased participation by 12,000 new players and, crucially, by an extra 2,000 new coaches. That is just one of many, many schemes, but councils and the Government can do more to help sporting groups and volunteer groups to identify the different streams of funding that are available.

My final point is about youth provision. My suggestion is a little bit contentious, but I have road-tested it on a number of schools, youth clubs and colleges. In the past, there was a traditional divide, whereby children were either very sporty and they went to a sports club, or they might choose to go to a youth club, and the divide would never be crossed. But times have changed and when I talk to young kids they are all very keen, either on whatever sport is popular on TV or even on things such as cheerleading or street dance, which are not strictly “sports” but which get the heart rate going.

I think that the youth service and the leisure service in local authorities should be merged to become one service. The chief officer within those areas should be one person and they should not employ armies of youth officers with very expensive youth clubs attended by only a handful of children, where they do things that we may have liked doing when we were younger but which, I can assure hon. Members, these days kids are not particularly switched on by. Instead, we should open up schools, community centres and leisure centres. We would pay for football coaches, street dance instructors and so on, and say, “Right, it is 50p. You come along and for the next two hours you’re in a constructive environment, and you’re doing something that is active.”

That is not just some pie-in-the-sky thing. In Swindon, we have the ice-skating disco on a Friday night for teenagers and 600 kids chase around the ice after whoever they think is particularly good-looking. They are being very active for a couple of hours; they are off the streets; and the youth service could and should be parking its mobile facility outside. Those young children who need the traditional youth service, from which they can get advice and seek help, will find that that is available. For all of the others who might have been put off going to the youth club, because that was the only thing that was available, there is the enjoyable activity of ice-skating. I am very keen to push such projects and we could judge their success by the number of children who are engaged by them.

To conclude, it is for us—whether we are the local authority or the Government—to provide as many opportunities as we can: through the planning system, through making changes in teaching cookery and in food labelling, and also through the power of sport.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrew Bingham]

I think that the Minister has been reading my notes. The point I was coming to was that we have talked a lot about what the Government can or cannot do, but this is one of many issues on which responsibility lies with us and with the parents of young people. My generation’s parents taught us how to poach eggs, for example; it is all about education in the home. I know that I sound like a grumpy old man, talking about how it was in my day, with rose-coloured glasses—[Hon. Members: “No, Never”] I will concede on grumpy; old I will argue with, at the moment. We can discuss different demographics, but if people are brought up on balanced, home-cooked food they will carry that on through their lives. It worries me that the more ready meal-type culture we have, the more it will go on and the bigger the problem will get.

We can expect, or ask, the Government to do this, that and the other, but as with many things, responsibility lies with individuals and with the parents of young children. That is where we need to start, with people being responsible for their own actions.

We have a fantastic opportunity with the 2012 Olympics, when we will see athletes from across the world. I will wager that in a year’s time, when Jessica Ennis wins a gold medal—I hope she does—we will see children out doing long jump and triple jump, using their own resources to copy their sporting heroes. We must capitalise on that. I played football in the winter as a kid because that was what was on TV, I played cricket in the summer and we all played tennis for two weeks when Wimbledon was on. We can use the Olympics. We talk about the legacy Olympics, and I would like the legacy to be the starting point for people getting active again.

[Justin Tomlinson]

We all have a role in encouraging our local schools to get 100% behind the school Olympics principle, so that when we have our successful athletes, in javelin or whatever we prove successful in, children can be inspired to take up the sport on a regular basis.

[Andrew Bingham]

Absolutely. There are dozens of sports in the Olympics, and everyone will watch and take an interest in one, so let us foster that and make the legacy of the games a healthier and more active society. We need to take that together with using the supermarkets, to get healthier eating.

We have a surfeit of cookery programmes on television. Every time we put it on there is someone gardening, doing DIY or cooking. Those three hobbies, or whatever we want to call them, can help to produce healthier people and a healthier country. Let us not necessarily rely on the Government. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Dr Poulter) that the health and wellbeing boards and the reforms in the Health Bill will help, but let us take on our responsibilities and get the message across to our constituents, getting the whole of society involved in this to make for a healthier and less obese Britain.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Abbott]

I am loth to agree with the Minister, but I think that he is right on that point. A particular interest of mine is the education of urban children and the challenges of getting them to achieve their educational potential. As part of working with parents, especially in urban communities, we must teach them that just putting their children in front of a television set is not necessarily the best thing for their health or their education.

I agree entirely with what has been said about exercise and sport, but we also need a particular focus on girls and exercise. Statistics show that girls give up exercise younger; after they leave school, they do not continue to exercise, as boys do. I was interested to hear about, was it ice hockey—

[Justin Tomlinson]

It was an ice-skating disco on Friday nights.

On the point about getting more girls involved, that is why I proposed merging youth and leisure services to identify opportunities. Girls, in particular, follow what is on television. If street dance, cheerleading or football is popular, let us provide those services and facilities, and they will come flocking.

[Ms Abbott]

I agree. That is the point that I was going to make. We need to be more innovative in the sorts of game that we encourage and make available to children. Girls do not want to play ping-pong, because they are quite self-conscious physically, but they will do things such as breakdancing and ice skating.

As other Members have said, we have a generation of parents, especially in inner cities, who do not know about food, have only the dimmest idea of where some foodstuffs come from and do not know how to cook. Because they are bombarded by advertising for processed food, when they whip out a ready meal from Marks and Spencer, it is not just idleness; they think that they are being good parents: “Look, I’m getting you something from Marks and Spencer which is advertised on the television.” We should work with communities and parents to educate them.

In my view, the Government obesity policy’s reliance on responsibility deals is a little problematic. Common sense suggests that companies that make billions of pounds every year peddling fizzy drinks and foods larded with trans fats will not seriously undermine their profits by genuinely trying to change the public’s eating habits. Although we must applaud the Government for whatever progress they think they have made with responsibility deals, we must go beyond them as they are currently fashioned if we are to stop the epidemic of obesity among our young people.

To return to the Government’s obesity strategy, the message from health professionals, key health groups and experts is clear. We need tough action now and a proper long-term strategy to stem the rising tide of lifestyle-related diseases. Jamie Oliver, probably the single most famous person in public health, has said in the past few weeks that this Government’s obesity strategy is

“worthless, regurgitated, patronising rubbish”.

As usual, he was not pulling his punches. Terence Stephenson, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said that the Government’s plan

“has no clear measures on how the food and drink industry will be made to be more ‘responsible’ in their aggressive marketing of unhealthy food…Suggesting that children in particular can be ‘nudged’ into making healthy choices, especially when faced with a food landscape which is persuading them to do the precise opposite, suggests this would be best described as a call to inaction.”

Which? executive director Richard Lloyd said that the Government’s approach to tackling obesity was

“woefully inadequate…The Government calls on people to cut down the calories they eat, but isn’t giving them the tools to do so.”

Charlie Powell, campaigns director of the Children’s Food Campaign, said:

“This is a deeply disappointing and utterly inadequate response which represents a squandered opportunity to address the UK’s obesity crisis.”

There is broad agreement in the House about the issues that we must address. It is a mix of issues; there is no silver bullet. Better labelling of food, including in restaurants and cafés, is part of the answer. Fashioning a sport offer for young boys and girls is crucial, as is better education and working with parents and communities.

I would like to say a word about gastric bands. We read an enormous amount about them, particularly in relation to celebrities. As a Conservative Member said, there are cases, if people have tried everything else, where a gastric band might be the answer, but I deprecate the promotion of gastric bands without some of the measures that we have discussed if that suggests to people that they can eat whatever rubbish they like because, at the end of the day, the NHS will pick up the tab for a gastric band. That is not the way forward, either for costs in the NHS or for people’s quality of life. I have read about people who, having got gastric bands, proceeded to liquidise fish and chips so they could continue to enjoy their favourite junk food. That suggests that a gastric band, in itself, is not the answer to the underlying issues.

I hope that, in his winding-up speech, the Minister will address the serious concerns raised about the Government’s obesity strategy by a wide range of stakeholders and specialists. I look forward to hearing what the Government plan to do further to address the growing epidemic of obesity among our young people.