Food: Regulation and Guidance

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Thursday 7th October 2010 Lords Chamber

Moved By

[Lord Whitty]

To call attention to the role of regulation and guidance in the food chain and of food standards in improving nutritional outcomes for adults and children; and to move for papers.

[Lord Whitty]

My Lords, first, I must declare an interest. I am for a few weeks longer the chair of Consumer Focus. I mention that because Consumer Focus and its predecessor organisation, the National Consumer Council, has a long history of trying to influence food policy from the common agricultural policy to areas of nutrition. Indeed, our social marketing sector is currently working with the noble Earl’s department on ways of changing consumer behaviour in relation to nutrition and other areas of public health. I cannot forbear from mentioning also that, along with many other public bodies, Consumer Focus has a question mark over it at the moment. I hope that it or another body survives to do this work in the future for the benefit of consumers and their role in food policy in general and nutrition in particular.

I shall focus on nutrition. No one can be unaware from reading the newspapers of the nutritional crisis facing the country and the consequent costs for the NHS. Yet in neither the Queen’s Speech nor the coalition agreement, as far as I can see, is there any mention of nutrition. According to a parliamentary reply in another place, as of the end of July at least, Ministers in the noble Earl’s department had not condescended to meet any consumer groups on this or any other issue. I hope that that has changed in the past few weeks.

Regrettably in one sense, the incoming Government have not been idle in this area because they have done at least three things, among which they have determined to abolish the School Food Trust, a body designed to improve the quality of school meals. The Secretary of State has issued a somewhat half-hearted apology to Jamie Oliver, having previously criticised his efforts. However, the area I want to concentrate on most is that as from last Friday, the responsibility for nutrition and dietary health was moved from the Food Standards Agency back to the Department of Health. I regard that as an extremely regressive step, in the wrong direction, that will seriously undermine the widely recognised need to tackle the problems of declining or largely declining nutritional standards.

Noble Lords will recall that the FSA was established in 2000 in the wake of the BSE scandal. It was established precisely because the public did not trust Ministers’ pronouncements on food safety or dietary advice. It was therefore important that we set up an organisation that was based on scientific evidence, not on passing political whims or bureaucratic considerations. Under the leadership first of the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, then of one of my predecessors at the National Consumer Council, Dame Deirdre Hutton, and now of my noble friend Lord Rooker, it has gone from strength to strength. It is respected for three key reasons. First, it is open and transparent; secondly, its pronouncements and regulatory approach are based on solid scientific evidence; and, thirdly, it has the consumer interest at its heart and involves consumers in its decision-making. Indeed, in a report by my organisation produced two years ago, Rating Regulators, of them all, the FSA scored the most positively on consumer interest and engagement. As a result, it has gained the trust and respect of most consumers, scientists and industry. Its key characteristics are openness, an evidence base, consumer engagement and public trust. With all due respect to the noble Earl, his colleagues and his department, and their predecessors, these are not characteristics often associated with the Department of Health or of its leadership: rather the reverse, I am afraid.

Trust is key in the area of nutrition. We must try to do as much as possible through information, persuasion and education, augmented where policy is required by regulation and guidance. We are faced with a serious nutritional crisis in this country, particularly in childhood. It is bizarre that our nation suffers such poor nutrition when, at a casual glance, there is huge interest in gourmet food both on television and in our glossy magazines. But for all that such a widespread choice is now available to consumers through supermarkets and elsewhere, and despite all the apparent public interest in upmarket food, the problem is that our nutrition is not improving and has in fact seriously declined since the 1950s. Despite all the efforts of government, of the FSA, of Jamie Oliver and of everybody else, they are of course up against different forces of persuasion—the forces of advertising, particularly the advertising of foods that are limited in their nutritional value and some that are actually nutritionally counterproductive.

This is particularly a problem for the very poor since the two lowest deciles pay out about 17 per cent of their household budget on food, compared with around 7 per cent for the likes of us. If you are a family with several young kids and no car, you also have the problem that the food outlets in your area are small and you cannot get to the supermarket. Even if you do manage to get to the supermarket, a survey by the NCC undertaken two years ago showed in many respects that the lower-price-range foods were often—not always, but often—of the least nutritional value when rated pound for pound sterling or avoirdupois. Moreover, the problem of food poverty is likely to increase. The reality is that the West has enjoyed cheap or cheapish food for the past 40 years. The globalisation of the food supply, the cheapness of fuel, improved logistics and serious technological change have brought cheap food to the West, helped by subsidies in North America, Europe and Japan, so that the consumer has been paying relatively little for food.

There are clear signs that the era of cheap food is now ending and going into reverse, with global pressures on demand through growing prosperity in China and India competing with demand in Europe and elsewhere. There are also limits on cultivatable land supply, and the impact of the environmental cost of extending that supply, which will eventually be embodied in the cost of food to the final consumer. Costs are going up generally and that will hit the poor in particular, but the problem of poor nutrition is by no means confined to poor and low-income families. Some of the least healthy of our children and young adults actually come from middle-income and relatively affluent families. The parents of those families, whether justifiably or not, see themselves as time poor and with not have enough time to choose more nutritional food or to cook it. Some would undoubtedly say that that is another symptom of our child-placating society because kids frequently want, and are encouraged to want by advertising campaigns, food that is not particularly good for them. Instead, our kids are filled up or bought off at all meals, from breakfast through to tea, with packets of crisps, burgers and sweets topped up by sugary fizzy drinks, all of which are widely advertised and hugely available directly to the kids themselves as they pass to and from school—indeed, sometimes, even now despite intervention by the previous Government and by local authorities, into schools themselves.

The shocking result is that, for many of our children, their diet is worse than it was in the 1950s. The prevalence of obesity has increased in the past 20 years and is now affecting 24.5 per cent of all adults. While that increase has flattened out a little, partly as a result of interventions by the last Government and the FSA, it is still marginally going up and is dramatically worse than it was 30 years ago. Some 10.1 million adults and 716,000 children are clinically obese. Around 2.5 million adults never eat any fresh fruit or vegetables, and after 10 years of campaigning on the “five a day” slogan only 19 per cent of our children actually reach that goal, compared with 22 per cent who eat between nought and two pieces. The National Diet and Nutrition Survey, reporting in August, also showed that we are still consuming well above the recommended level of saturated fats and sugar. The intake of fibre is below recommended levels, as is oily fish for omega acids.

The balance of our diets, whether as adults or children, is not right—and I emphasise that I am talking about balance. Like several other noble Lords, I suspect, I am a war baby, and those who were brought up immediately after the war on national health orange juice ended up in the 1950s with a fairly good diet. However, on the day sweet rationing was abolished, I remember buying a farthing’s worth of hundreds and thousands in my corner shop. Little did I know that that measure was the start of a decline in the nutritional standards of children. But of course it was not. The food industry always asserts when you attack some of its products that it is not a question of bad food but a question of bad diet—and that is true. However, it is also true that if we depend on foods of poor nutritious value such as crisps, sugar, butter and dairy products—and if the balance of our diet is made up of those foods—it is extremely bad for us whatever age we are.

In recent years there has been some improvement through a variety of sources, some of which are surprising. When I started as a Minister in Defra in 2001, the FDF, the manufacturers’ association, was in denial. It was chaired at that time by the director of Cadbury’s but, even so, it took a heavy line that its products had nothing to do with health and nutrition. Now, firms such as Mars, which you would think was an offender, have reformulated their chocolate to eliminate trans fats. McDonald’s, which is often the bogeyman in this area, has greatly improved the nutritional value of its offerings at the retail end. Caterers at the top end of the market have also begun to show calorie scores on their doors and on their menus, a process that was pioneered by Consumer Focus Scotland.

Although there are still problems with the supermarkets, four years ago sweets were offered at the till, a location that gave maximum pester power to kids to harass their mothers who were trying to find enough money to pay the bill. I am pleased to say that that has gone in most supermarkets.

The previous Government helped by reintroducing and improving nutritional standards for school meals. However, the biggest contributor has been the Food Standards Agency, which has improved the situation through a combination of sustained persuasion based on firm scientific evidence; the use of regulation and targets—for example, by putting pressure and a target date on the manufacturers of bread and other products to reduce the salt content; the use of guidance and codes of practice, including most recently advice to caterers; and by pressurising for a restriction on advertising. A change was made by a rather reluctant Ofcom, although I, my organisation and many others, including the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, in a debate not long ago in this Chamber, pressed it to go further. However, we have cut out television advertising during children-specific programmes.

We have moved hard on nutrition labelling, which is not a happy story. The FSA, supported by my organisation and others in the nutrition field, were going for a traffic light system. More than half of the supermarkets were prepared to do that but most of the manufacturers and the remainder of the supermarkets resisted. As a result we have had about a five-year delay before ending up with a less good form of labelling. Nevertheless, a coherent form of labelling is about to launch—which is at least progress—both here and at the European level. However, it took that long to get there. Incidentally, if we are not careful, we will do the same with the labelling of carbon products. We need a single, clear, significant and comprehensible system of labelling in that field was well.

The attack—led largely by the FSA—on major social and behavioural patterns, which have all been going the wrong way in the past 30 years, has combined information, education, guidance, regulation, social marketing and advertising. The FSA has served us well. However, in the last of those areas we need stronger intervention now. The Ofcom guidelines on advertising to children on TV relate only to children-specific programmes—which, as everyone will know, are a minority of the programmes that children actually watch. We had to see through a lot of opposition from the industry to get that far—it was a good first step—but we need to go further. Indeed, advertising what is clearly junk food should not be allowed any more than advertising tobacco and alcohol should—certainly on television.

It would have been better if responsibility for nutrition had remained with an independent, respected, scientifically based organisation. I accept that some parts of nutritional policy have always rested with the Department of Health, even after the creation of the FSA, and that it would be sensible to put it into one place. However, in Scotland, where they have come to that conclusion as well, the one place would be the FSA. In terms of public credibility, reputation and the likely effect on patterns of eating and family behaviour, direction by the FSA is much better than direction and representation by the department or, with all due respect, by the noble Earl and his colleagues going on television and telling us what we should eat. It is a wrong move. I hope the Government, who have already enacted it and taken away a fifth of the Food Standards Agency’s total resources, will consider it again. Indeed, I suspect that a few years down the line the move will be in the reverse direction, whether under this Government or another. The importance of the nutrition crisis requires independent, authoritative and trusted sources of advice and direction, and a more proactive form of regulation. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Whitty]

My Lords, I welcome much of what the Minister has just said and I welcome very much the contributions of everybody in this debate. My noble friend Lord Giddens and the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, reminded us that this is only part of a huge issue about the world food industry and food chain, and its inter-relations with individuals, with society and with the environment. That might well be appropriate for a wider debate at some point in this House.

Almost everybody has accepted that we have a serious nutritional crisis on our hands; the Minister has just done so. The noble Lord, Lord Patel, the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, and my noble friend Lord Rea have particular professional experience in these areas with the more vulnerable people. It was much welcomed that we drew attention to those things. The only points of contention around this House were, first, the role of regulation and, secondly, which part of government should be responsible. On regulation the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, played his part as the man in the street. He did it quite well and we do not think that he is mad—or, at least, not much madder than the rest of us—but the man in the street or, more particularly, the woman in the supermarket wants more understandable advice and more bad things banned. My noble friend Lord Rea and the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, made the point that, at times, we have to have a bit more regulation.

However, that was not actually my main point about the FSA, which has used softer but more effective means, some of which the Minister has just referred to, as well as regulation. Often, the threat of regulation, as my noble friend Lord Rea said, produces miracles to which otherwise industry would not respond. The FSA’s record in the area of nutrition, as well as of food safety, is difficult to replicate in a government department. I wish the government department with that responsibility well, but—and this is where responsibility lies—the FSA has a reputation for independence, which is important and was the original concept behind it, and for its scientific base. It is also trusted by the public and nutritionists and, as my noble friend Lady Hayter said, trusted by consumers. I welcome the assurance that that consumer engagement will continue to be an issue, but independence is more likely to be trusted than political management.

I wonder sometimes why Ministers actually want that responsibility. I am not against Ministers taking some more general responsibility for the operation of agencies, as the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, suggested, but on actual advice to the public it is most difficult for Ministers to be taking responsibility. Indeed, history is littered with otherwise eminent, successful and distinguished Conservative politicians who have fallen foul of this: Edwina Currie for telling us what we could not eat—as the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, reminded us—and John Gummer for telling us what we could eat. John Gummer has, of course, had to change his name to come into this House.

The Minister may object that that was food safety and not nutrition but, as somebody said to me, the only difference between interventions on nutrition and those on food safety are that the latter are to stop us eating things which will kill us quickly, while interventions on nutrition are to stop us eating things which will kill us slowly. My final contention is that both of those are better off in an independent agency, but for the moment I wish the noble Earl and his colleagues joy of them. I beg to withdraw the Motion.

Motion withdrawn.