Childhood Obesity: Bexley

Steve Brine Excerpts

Tuesday 6th March 2018 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Steve Brine)]

Let me start by repeating what was said by my right hon. Friend the Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (David Evennett): childhood obesity remains one of the top public health challenges, if not the top one, facing this generation. I have said that in this Chamber before, and I welcome any chance to debate this subject. I congratulate my right hon. Friend on securing the debate. I also echo his words about how nice it is to see my right hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (James Brokenshire) back in his place. He is my dear friend and I worked closely with him when he was Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. We have said many prayers for him in the last few months. It is great to see him back in his place.

As right hon. and hon. Members will be aware, the latest figures, which I pore over, continue to show us that child obesity rates in England remain way too high. Almost a quarter of children are overweight or obese when they start primary school. Probably more worrying is the fact that that figure rises to around a third by the time they leave primary school.

Evidence shows us that the deprivation gap in obesity prevalence between children in the most and least deprived areas is increasing. My right hon. Friend the Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford gave figures for Bexley, and he was right to, but let me give some national averages. Obesity prevalence among children in reception living in the most deprived areas was 12.7%, compared with just 5.8% among those living in the least deprived areas. In year 6—the final year of primary school—those figures were 26.3% and 11.4% respectively. That gap worries me. It should worry us all. It continues to widen. This is one of the great burning injustices of our times; the Prime Minister has used that phrase, and she is dead right. My view is that we have not just a right to act, but a responsibility to act as a Government with a publicly-funded health system.

Bexley is fairly affluent, but there are areas of significant deprivation, as there are in all of our constituencies. Data for Bexley show higher rates of excess weight in children than the averages for London and for England. Also, obesity prevalence has remained higher than the national average, as my right hon. Friend said, for over five years, so he is right to highlight the issue. The impact for Bexley and the rest of the country was highlighted just last week through new analysis by my good friends and partners at Cancer Research UK suggesting that millennials are on course to be the most overweight generation in history. That should and does worry us greatly.

We know that obese children are much more likely to become obese adults; it is very hard to lose the weight, as my right hon. Friend said. That increases their risk of developing the serious diseases that I speak about as part of my portfolio, including type 2 diabetes. There was a lot of press coverage and an Adjournment debate in the House last week about the sheer number of people picking up type 2 diabetes, which is an entirely preventable condition. It increases your risk of heart disease and some types of cancer, including bowel and breast, two of the most common cancers, which is why CRUK are rightly so active in this space. It is also a major risk factor for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

We launched our child obesity plan in August 2016, as my right hon. Friend rightly said. It was a very robust piece of work informed by the latest evidence and research in the area. At the heart of the plan is a simple desire to change the nature of food that children eat and to make it easier for families and parents—who play a key role—to make healthier choices for them and for the country.

The plan is a challenge—and it is meant to be—to us in national Government as well as those in local government, which I will come on to, in businesses, in the NHS, and in schools and families. We all have a role to play in reducing child obesity levels. In developing the plan, my officials and my predecessors have been clear, as I am, that we have considered a number of different policies. We have focused on the ones that are likely to have the biggest impact on preventing child obesity.

As my right hon. Friend will remember, key measures in the plan include the soft drinks industry levy, which was announced by the previous Chancellor; the sugar reduction and wider reformulation programme; and helping children to enjoy an hour of physical activity every day, which is so important.

Since we published the plan, real progress has been made on sugar reduction. The soft drinks industry levy will come into effect in April—it is important to remember that it has not yet come into force, but it is nudging behaviour. Public Health England has formulated a comprehensive sugar reduction programme with the aim of a 20% reduction in sugar in key foods by 2020, including a 5% reduction in year one. We will be judging that shortly to see where progress has been made.

Companies, such as the makers of Lucozade, are important. I visited the headquarters of Ribena, the Suntory brand, in Uxbridge earlier this year. I pay great tribute to its work. I was in the lab testing the new Ribena, which goes live this week.

[David Evennett]

Was it nice?

--- Later in debate ---

[Steve Brine]

It was very nice and very refreshing.

As a company, Ribena has taken a hit in doing that, but it reports great staff satisfaction and a feeling that it is doing the right thing. As the Minister, I have never been afraid to call out businesses that are making poor choices and those that are making the right choices. Ribena is making the right choices.

Kellogg’s also made a good decision about the reformulation of sugar in its cereals, which sit on my children’s breakfast table every morning. Tesco, Waitrose and Nestlé have led the way by removing millions of tonnes of sugar from their products and they deserve credit for that. We expect almost half of all drinks that would otherwise have been in-scope of the soft drinks industry levy to have been reformulated by the time it comes in. That is a crucial step towards improving our children’s health, as data shows that sugary soft drinks are the main contributor of sugar in our children’s diets.

My right hon. Friends might be thinking that we will be victims of our own success, because the industry levy will not produce the revenue so we will not be able to reinvest it. However, someone far cleverer than me, before my time, managed to persuade the Treasury—a clever, neat trick—that we will invest all the revenue we expected to get from the levy, plus what we said we hoped to raise during this Parliament, in giving school-aged children a better and healthier future, including through doubling the primary school PE and sport premium; investing in school breakfast clubs, which are so important; and providing £100 million in 2018-19 for a new healthier pupils capital fund.

As was said by my right hon. Friend the Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford and by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), who is no longer in his place, this work should be done between the Department for Education and the Department of Health and Social Care, and of course it is being. Our original plan was a cross-Government piece of work. Last month, I talked to the new Secretary of State for Education about the plan and introduced him to some of things that I want to do.

It is a joined-up conversation because, as my right hon. Friend said, schools have a huge role to play in teaching children about healthy eating. The national curriculum requires them to teach children about food, nutrition and healthy eating, and how to cook a repertoire of dishes as part of design and technology classes. Things have changed since my day, when a fish finger sandwich was one of my challenges in design and technology and I managed to get it wrong.

It is compulsory for pupils in maintained schools from key stages 1 to 3 to be taught about the principles of a healthy and varied diet and why that is important, and the national curriculum can be used as a benchmark for free schools and academies, which ordinarily sit outside it. Alongside our commitment to continue to provide free school lunches to infant pupils, which means that about 1.4 million more children are eating a healthy lunch, we are investing £26 million in breakfast clubs, using revenue from the soft drinks industry levy.

Our plan is not just about school-aged children. In November, we published a series of example menus and associated guidance to support early years settings, such as nurseries and childminders, to offer food and drink in line with Government dietary recommendations for infants and children from about six months to four years—a key cohort—before they get to primary school.

The guidance includes useful information for early years settings to show how they can meet the early years foundation stage welfare requirement to provide “healthy, balanced and nutritious” meals for children. They are also responsible for educating parents and carers to help them to prepare healthy, balanced meals at home and introduce their child to new foods. There has to be a consistent thread from the education setting to the home setting.

My right hon. Friend was right to mention local authorities, which have a key role to play in creating healthier local environments in our constituencies. They can have a significant impact in local communities through levers such as the planning system, urban design and transport strategies. There are great examples of that, such as the restrictions on new hot food takeaways in Gateshead, which is something that my right hon. Friend might want to look at. I was interested to hear from my right hon. Friend about the borough-wide prevention strategy. As the Minister with responsibility for prevention, I would be interested to hear more and I note his offer to visit him in his constituency.

Other local initiatives include last year’s London-wide great weight debate on child obesity, which several London authorities, including Bexley, took part in. Such events show how communities can make their own contributions. The results of that debate are feeding into the five-year obesity strategy being developed in Bexley, which my right hon. Friend talked about. I welcome that, because it cannot all be about what the national Government do. We have to set the framework and the ambition. Sometimes we can use the taxation system as we have with the industry levy, but local government has a key role to play. I am excited to see the progress being made.

We continue to learn from the latest evidence around the country and around the world, such as the very interesting whole-systems approach in Amsterdam that led to a reduction of 2,500 in the number of overweight and obese children between 2012 and 2015. I am talking to people there and I hope to visit at some point.

This week, as my right hon. Friend mentioned, to implement part one of the child obesity plan, we launched our ambitious calorie-reduction programme alongside Public Health England. It is ambitious: it challenges all sectors of the food and drink industry to reduce calories in everyday food by 20% by 2024. I absolutely believe the sectors can do that—we have had a brilliant and positive response from them—and yesterday’s announcement, which is in the newspapers today, is very welcome. We are confident that those measures can make an impact.

All the reports and data that we publish on our progress in delivering our world-leading childhood obesity plan will be open to scrutiny and, I hope, to further debates in this place. That will include Public Health England’s assessment of progress on sugar reduction, which I mentioned earlier and which will be published in the spring. The Obesity Policy Research Unit’s evaluation of that research will be published as individual projects are completed. We are deliberately publishing and being measured all the time, and we will use that to decide whether sufficient progress has been made and whether we need to go further.

I thank my right hon. Friends the Members for Bexleyheath and Crayford and for Old Bexley and Sidcup for their contributions, and I look forward to continuing the conversation in coming months.

Question put and agreed to.