Children and Young People: Obesity

Lord Addington Excerpts

Tuesday 17th April 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for bringing this debate forward. It is one we have dealt with for a while. It is also one where we can start by being a more cross-party group, because the Government have had a policy on this and they have done something. Indeed, I congratulate them. A warm waft of nostalgia came from my desk at about 2 o’clock this afternoon when I received an email telling me how we must not go too far, not to be excessive and everything else. It was from the Advertising Association. It reminded me so much of the stuff we got when we were discussing the ban on smoking. Shall we say that a record of past success seems to be being trodden by the Government here? Okay, they have not done it fast or thoroughly enough and anything else, but they seem to be taking the first few steps.

The noble Lord, Lord McColl, and I have differed slightly on the role of exercise in weight control, but he is right on one thing: a sugar-saturated diet is a great way to pile on weight. Some fizzy drinks are basically two litres of sugar-enhanced, carbonated liquid. The only way you can burn that off is by tramping across the Arctic in mid-winter, when you need that degree of sugar. I have also disagreed with the noble Lord on whether you burn up calories by rebuilding muscle after exercise, but let us not go into that now.

However, when it comes down to exercise, I ask the Government to remember one thing very clearly: the obesity epidemic is most pronounced in low-income bits of the economy. The highest degree of exercise is seen in the high-income bits of the economy; there is a divergence there. People who stay active or who are allowed to become active have the least problems. I would suggest that this is because those on higher incomes have better opportunities to take up activity. If you play a sport regularly, you are more likely to take some control over your diet. If you have not become terribly obese in the first place, you are more likely to take up your exercise. If the cheaper foods you are buying are not laden with fat, there is a relationship. It is statistically proven that the groups who take the most exercise have the least problems—there is no real argument about that.

What can the Government do to break into this? First, they should make sure that schools and those who provide sport to school-age children receive all the support they can, so that they can get on with the process of being physically active and having a reason to maintain their weight. At the moment, there is a problem. If you are dependent on the facilities of a local authority, and that local authority has closed down parks, gyms and sports fields, you are not going to be taking any exercise, are you? You just cannot; there is not the opportunity. If you are dependent on a private gym and cannot afford it, you do not go to the gym. If you have not established that exercise pattern, you will be a very unusual person if you then take that on.

However, we have one wonderful utility that we should go back to: the amateur sports structure of this country. I know that steps have been taken and we have talked about this, but unless we encourage those links and manage to get the whole of government—education, health and local government; it takes everybody, even the Home Office, which is involved in vetting coaching staff—actively to support such groups, things will go wrong. I am afraid that was the case with the school sport partnerships, where we more or less got rid of something which at least showed signs of promise.

Why is this so important? If one has links with clubs outside, you are not dependent for your sporting activity on educational institutions. They break down linkage between the stopping of sporting activity and the ages of 16, 18 and 21, when you leave educational establishments—the age of 16 is the biggest one. So you have to get in there. All governing bodies in sports should take seriously the job of educating to keep people involved, safe and fit, and of trying to get them to engage in participatory activity. We are not talking about elite-level sportsmen here; we are talking solely about the weekend warrior, as my entire sporting career was apparently spent. Unless government finds a coherent way to encourage that, we will not be utilising this wonderful resource which is available for free and wants to be given the job. I hope that the Government will look at this to make sure that we have a coherent strategy for using those who want to help.