Children’s Health: Ultra-processed Foods

Lord Allan of Hallam Excerpts

Wednesday 25th October 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Allan of Hallam (LD)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, for prompting this debate. I shall use my brief remarks to make a modest proposal that I hope will offer the Minister a creative way to address issues related to food quality and health. In short, this is that we should require large retailers to make data about food purchases available, within a controlled framework, to support research and policy development.

The argument for this will be familiar to anyone following the regulation of online services, where we are responding to concerns about the diet of information being served to people and how this may lead to various kinds of harm. The logic for this approach is as follows. Policy-making should be evidence-based, using data both to predict the impact of new measures and to evaluate the effectiveness of previous interventions. Where there is a significant public interest in making policy interventions in an area, this creates the case for requiring organisations to make useful data available. There is a major public interest in understanding the relationship between food consumption and health outcomes for both adults and children in the United Kingdom. Major retailers have very sophisticated and comprehensive datasets about food purchases that would be of enormous value to researchers and policymakers.

Any concerns about commercial confidentiality can be resolved within a sensible framework, just as they are in other areas, such as banking and online services. Similarly, we can look at good practice elsewhere to ensure that useful data can be provided, while not compromising the privacy of individuals. Companies may be willing to share data in the public interest, and such a voluntary approach is worth exploring in the first instance. If that proves insufficient, a regulatory requirement should be considered. We have many examples to build on of where regulation requires private businesses to provide data to support public safety goals; we can look at financial services and the pharmaceutical industries to see that working well today.

The models that are being developed right now for online services may be especially useful for a read-across to food retailers, given the similar nature of the challenge: we are seeking to identify patterns of harmful behaviour within a very high volume of normally benign activity. I hope the Minister will agree that it is worth some of his department’s time and effort to explore the benefits of this approach. If we can move from anecdote to well-sourced evidence, this will help us in all our work in this place on measures related to health and food consumption. If we are able to take retailer data about food purchasing practice and match that up with health data, which I know the NHS has in abundance, we can start to draw valid conclusions. Whether you are with the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, or the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, in terms of your starting assumptions, having that data will allow us to have a much better-informed debate. I hope that this is a useful modest proposal that the Minister will look upon kindly.