Food, Diet and Obesity Committee Report

Lord Rennard Excerpts

Friday 28th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rennard (LD)]

My Lords, our debate has created much passion and many personal emotions for me, including in thinking about the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe, and his experience of giving up alcohol 43 years ago. We have had a fairly wide consensus across the House on many measures that are needed to help reduce the large gap in life expectancy between the richest and the poorest in this country; to reduce the figure of two in every five children in England leaving primary school above a healthy weight; and to lessen the financial and other burdens placed on people who are overweight and on the nation as a whole. But we have also heard constant frustration about the Government’s very limited response to the excellent report. Indeed, I think the flavour of the debate has been largely to describe the response as pitiful.

Thirty years ago, I was 40 kilos heavier than I am now—or, to put it another way, I am now more than six stone lighter. My weight is still going down, but it has been an issue throughout my life and a source of depression. It made me a target for bullying from school onwards. I consider myself fortunate to now be classified as “overweight” rather than “obese”, but we cannot just hope for good fortune to reverse the escalating scale of the problem with obesity and its links, for people like me, to type 2 diabetes and other health conditions.

In discussing the Government’s response to the excellent report of our Select Committee, so brilliantly led by my noble friend Lady Walmsley, our debate has highlighted much of what I feel that I have learned personally, and often painfully, as I used to let my own health get completely out of control. We have highlighted very strongly how the Government really must take forward more of the many practical and positive suggestions in the report. We know that they have some determination to do so, but that this determination is still very limited.

I mention my personal struggle with weight and diabetes because one of the things that we must address is the stigma that accompanies these conditions as we address educating children, and their parents, about such issues. The approach of personal responsibility and “pull your own socks up”, if I might thus describe the approach set out by the noble Lord, Lord McColl, is not just unhelpful but deeply counterproductive.

I learned nothing about nutrition at school. I am probably one of the few Members of this House who had free school meals. I always chose the options with chips, but I see much worse options being chosen these days, as children leave school in the early afternoon, not having had any form of lunch, and pour into the nearby fried chicken and burger shops. In relation to food generally, I prefer the French approach described by the noble Baroness, Lady Meyer.

I am pleased that more fast food outlets will, in future, be blocked from selling cheap, unhealthy, high-fat products so near to schools, but in my view they should really be banned from selling such products in close proximity to schools altogether. I welcome the long-overdue restrictions on the advertising of their products targeted at young people. But, as my noble friend Lady Suttie said, parents do not have information or understanding about sugar content. We really must properly address issues of labelling.

Only the provision of healthy and nutritious free school meals will really help to address the problems we are talking about. In the meantime, I welcome the greater provision of breakfast clubs, which I hope will offer healthy alternatives to white toast and sugary cereals.

Boys and girls, men and women can all suffer from body image issues, as well as from the health conditions that arise from being overweight, including the greater likelihood of developing type 2 diabetes. Schools need to address these issues while doing much more to promote health education, cookery skills, as described by the noble Baroness, Lady Browning, and physical activity in schools and after school.

The resulting ill-health caused by being overweight or obese is, for many families, a major factor in their relative poverty. It limits their capacity to work, their life experiences and their emotional well-being, and puts significant burdens on the state through our health and care system. It results in damage to the economy, as there is far more reliance on the state and there are fewer tax contributions. The Institute for Government estimates that the economic impact of obesity in this country is between 1% and 2% of our GDP.

Healthier food is, sadly, more expensive than the least healthy options. Families are trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty causing ill health, which makes it harder for them to get out of poverty and live more healthily. That is why I and my party strongly support scrapping the two-child limit for universal credit or tax credits. But we are going in the wrong direction this week with the Government’s new measures, which will push 50,000 more children into poverty and a total of 250,000 people altogether.

The Government’s response to the report accepts that

“mandatory regulation can drive change”,

and says that parts of the industry welcome the setting of a level playing field to avoid the most unscrupulous in the food and drink industry seeking competitive advantage. But we should also ask why action that was promised after the Covid pandemic highlighted the dangers of being overweight was suddenly rolled back. The answer is the unscrupulous lobbying on behalf of parts of the industry, adopting tactics with which some of us are familiar from the tobacco industry. They seek to scare MPs and those who work for them into thinking that action to improve the nation’s health may be damaging electorally. Such lobbyists use their dark arts via well-funded think tanks, which, unlike political parties, can keep their sources of funding secret. Those who lobby in this way must be forced in future to declare their sources of funding and to list them, together with all their contacts with Ministers, parliamentarians and those who work with us. The soft drinks levy has proved hugely successful and we need such a measure now for foods, especially for ultra-processed foods.

Some of what the Government are doing is welcome, but there is widespread agreement about the problems, as the report clearly shows. The Government can and should go further and faster and be more radical as we seek to tackle the epidemics of obesity and diabetes.