Tackling Obesity

Preet Kaur Gill Excerpts

Tuesday 27th February 2024 Westminster Hall

[Preet Kaur Gill (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Dowd. I thank the right hon. Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Sir David Evennett) for securing this debate. He has been a strong campaigner for tackling childhood obesity over many years, and I thank him for his remarks today.

As many colleagues have rightly highlighted, the obesity epidemic is a genuine crisis. It will be the next big public health issue that we will all be talking about in a few years. Some 60% of us are now overweight. One in four children in England are now obese by the time they leave primary school. That means that those children are five times more likely to go on to develop serious and life-limiting diet-related conditions in adulthood, such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, liver disease and certain forms of cancer. Of course, that means more pressure on the NHS, which, as we know, is already buckling under the weight of demand after years of mismanagement by this Government. It is a disaster for the taxpayer: Frontier Economics estimates the impact of obesity to be £98 billion a year in NHS and social care costs, lost productivity, workforce inactivity and welfare payments.

I thank many Members for rightly focusing their remarks today on the poor food environments in which children are growing up, and what we as policymakers can do about that. In recent decades, action on obesity has overwhelmingly focused on measures to get people to change their behaviours without tackling the structural factors that influence them. We know that that is not enough. For example, 99.9% of us know that it is important to get our five a day, most of us can tell each other what a healthy diet looks like, and every week there seems to be some new fad diet. The bottom line is the nation’s waistline: Britain is getting fatter.

It is therefore disappointing to see the Secretary of State say that she believes the priority for preventing obesity is to give people information about nutrition with no measures to fix the food environment. It appears to be at odds with her views on tobacco, where the Government have rightly taken up measures to further protect children from tobacco harm. She does not believe that measures to inform children about the dangers of tobacco are alone sufficient to solve that issue, so why does she believe this for obesity? If giving people more information is the solution, can the Minister explain why obesity rates are twice as high in our poorest areas than the richest?

Labour believes that every community in the UK should be a healthy place for children to grow up, learn and play. Businesses need a healthy workforce to drive economic productivity and sustainable growth. It is the Government’s job to make the healthy choice the easy choice. There was a moment in 2020 when it looked like every party across the House believed this. The Government brought forward the 2020 obesity strategy, welcomed by doctors, parents and health charities, and as the right hon. Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford said, it received cross-party support.

The strategy contained evidence-based measures to begin to fix the food system by stopping our children from being bombarded with junk food adverts as part of a major commitment to halve childhood obesity by 2030. I would like to ask the Government today what has happened to that commitment, since they kicked that flagship policy into the long grass, delaying the policy for the next Government to deal with in October 2025. Are the Government still committed to halving childhood obesity by 2030, and what have they done since delaying the junk food advertising policies?

The need for action has not gone away, as we have heard today. The health of our children is in a dire state, and it is getting worse. It was once thought that it was essentially impossible for children to develop type 2 diabetes so early in life as a result of their diet, but as mentioned by the right hon. Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford, we are now seeing thousands of cases of children developing the condition, with more every year. Nearly four in 10 children with obesity are estimated to have early stage fatty liver disease, and tooth decay remains the single largest cause of hospitalisations for young children in England.

The Government assure us that the regulations on junk food advertising were delayed merely to give industry more time to prepare. If this is the case, why have the Government refused to bring out the supporting secondary legislation for these regulations, which are now months overdue? Surely the Minister agrees that it would help the industry prepare for these regulations to have this detail available to them now. Industry will want to tackle the structural drivers of ill health and be led by evidence, not ideology. That starts with delivering the measures the Government have failed to implement to protect children from junk food.

We will restrict adverts for foods high in fat, sugar and salt in favour of healthier options. We will improve children’s diets by finally implementing the 9pm watershed for junk food advertising on television and ban paid-for advertising of less healthy foods in online media. Tackling health inequalities is a central part of Labour’s health mission. We will not resort to the tired excuses that would blame families in Blackpool for having poorer health than someone in Banbury. Instead, we need to focus on making healthy food more affordable and accessible. Schools will have a role and responsibility within that, which is why our fully funded breakfast clubs in every primary school in England will serve healthy and balanced food to embed healthy habits and boost children’s concentration and development.

The Government undertook some assessments of the health impacts of the national school breakfast programme when it was running. It would be really good to hear what some of the evidence was. We heard from schools that it improved pupil behaviour, their readiness to learn, social skills and their eating habits. To conclude, I want to leave Members with a statistic to reflect just how stark this issue is. Not only are our children fatter than their peers in other European countries, but they are actually shorter than their European peers.