Queen’s Speech

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome the new Health Ministers, the noble Lord, Lord Prior, and, in her absence, the noble Baroness, Lady Chisholm. I wish them well. I wish them good health and that they will be able to improve the health of the nation in their new roles. I hope that they will seek to apply to themselves and, in particular, to their senior officials the statutory duty of candour for the NHS which the Secretary of State introduced in the previous Parliament.

Notwithstanding that, and the unsuccessful attempts of some of us parliamentarians to gain public access to the official activities of former Health Minister Andrew Lansley in the run-up to the Health and Social Care Act 2012, it was pleasing to hear in the Recess that the High Court had ruled that there should after all be disclosure. In doing so, Mr Justice Charles said that the two senior civil servants were “unimpressive” witnesses and concluded that their evidence had fallen,

“way below the standards that the public and the FTT are entitled to expect of government departments and senior civil servants in advancing public interest arguments”.

So if the Minister cannot answer me this evening, I would be grateful if he would subsequently write to tell me whether the Government have decided to submit a further appeal or are willing to accept the judgment and go public. I hope that they will go public; then we can put this behind us and it will be the end of the episode. In future, though, when we talk about candour it should apply right across the board, not just to civil servants but to government Ministers. Looking at the noble Lord, Lord Prior, I am sure that he will endeavour to ensure that.

Having got that off my chest, I welcome the Government’s commitment in the gracious Speech to implement the National Health Service’s own five-year plan. My health interest is mainly in public health policy, well-being and lifestyle. I focus particularly, as many noble Lords will know, on the health problems arising from alcohol abuse. The NHS five-year plan calls for,

“a radical upgrade in prevention and public health”,

and specifically calls for,

“hard-hitting national action on obesity, smoking and alcohol”.

More recently, the NHS CEO, Simon Stevens, has stated that obesity is now becoming a bigger killer than smoking. That must be of huge concern to all of us, particularly to the Government as they continue to struggle to get public spending and the deficit under control. It is true that the coalition made some progress on those items, but in one area, obesity—and they could not point to the Labour Government prior to them failing—they failed badly. All the records indicate that during the period of the coalition being in power, the waists and weight of the nation grew, and obesity expanded. That needs to be reversed. It is now one of the major health issues facing us, and over the course of the coming months I will be looking to see just what the Government intend to do to address this problem.

I make the point that the problem arises not solely from food, as many people seem to believe, or from a lack of exercise, but also from drinking alcohol. Alcohol is a significant but generally unrecognised and unknown contributor to obesity. Most alcoholic drinks contain sugar, some in very large amounts indeed. A relatively small number of producers and distributors show calories on their product labels, but most do not—and few, if any, show the sugar content. Noble Lords may think that this is a relatively minor or indeed trivial issue but I do not; I believe that it is one of several factors on which action needs to be taken to start to improve the nation’s health, particularly with regard to obesity.

It worries me that so far the Government have not been able to get any movement on this front. I have been chasing them on it for five years. We have had some retailers making changes voluntarily, but the overwhelming bulk of them still do not show anything in this area. It worries me that if the Government cannot resolve relatively minor or trivial issues, as some people refer to them, what chance is there that they will face up to the really tough decisions that they will have to take in respect of obesity, given their failure to move on the smaller topics?

I shall give the House an example of where the Government ran away from taking a tough decision in the last Parliament: minimum unit pricing. The drinks industry itself, however, knows that pricing works. That is why it lobbied the Chancellor so aggressively before the last Budget, a couple of months ago. The industry lobbied for a freeze or reduction in excise duties and won—and it is very pleased indeed with the out-turn from that, because it means that it will be able to maintain or increase its market share and sales.

However, when it comes to the Government introducing minimum unit pricing to reduce the sale of alcohol, the industry pretends not to be convinced of the case and the evidence that it would work. On the one hand we have the industry itself, which knows that it works, and on the other hand the Government are still unconvinced. I put it to the Minister that he needs to address this topic early on. Alcohol affects people’s health in a whole range of areas, as well as obesity. I am patron of the British Liver Trust, and we have seen in recent years that liver disease and deaths caused by it have been increasing, and there is a whole range of other topics where health is affected by alcohol. However, this evening I am speaking in particular about our major problem of obesity.

Given that the five-year plan and the CEO of the NHS have been so specific about the urgent need to tackle this issue, and that past policies—certainly over the last five years—have failed, can the Minister say when he will come to the public and to the House to set out the programme that now needs to be implemented, to truly start to tackle the fundamental problems that arise which relate to obesity, certainly on the drinks side, but also in other areas, including food? We need to see a truly hard-hitting programme put in place that we can all come together around, to make sure that we can reduce the number of deaths that are likely to arise in the future, and in turn reduce the costs that arise for the National Health Service.