Obesity

Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 3:40 pm on 17 October 2007.

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Photo of Earl Howe Earl Howe Shadow Minister, Health 3:40, 17 October 2007

My Lords, the House will be grateful to the Minister for repeating the Statement. My first reaction is that it is a Statement that contains more hope value than realism. We all appreciate that obesity is a societal problem, but government have a major role to play and the Government's record on obesity is, frankly, not inspiring.

In 1999, they abandoned the targets set by the previous Conservative Government. Nothing then happened until 2004, when the PSA target was set following two scathing reports from the CMO and the Health Committee on the costs of obesity. Even then, it was a further two years before a letter went out in September 2006 admitting that the local delivery plans by strategic health authorities to tackle obesity had still not been finalised.

The target set in 2004 was to halt the year-on-year rise in obesity among children under 11 by 2010, yet the Government have repeatedly failed to provide figures to show whether or not progress has been made. The evidence we have suggests that we are moving in the wrong direction, and this latest Foresight report bears this out. The Government's new target is therefore incredibly ambitious given that, up to now, they have not yet managed to stall obesity levels, let alone reverse them.

Their failure on that front is perhaps less surprising when looked at alongside the numbers of staff working in NHS public health. Those numbers, if we exclude consultants, have more than halved in the 10 years the Government have been in power. What plans are there to reverse that position, given that none of these initiatives can be rolled out without people to do the work on the ground?

On school sport, an enormous amount of hot air is being blasted out. In July the Prime Minister announced £100 million to give every child the chance of five hours sport every week. Yet it turns out that only two hours out of the five are going to be built into the school curriculum; the other three hours will have to be funded by community sports clubs. The amount of lottery money going into sport has fallen by 50 per cent since 1998, and we now know that the Olympics overspend will remove another £70 million. The pledges made in 2000 by Tony Blair to give £750 million to school sport and to create 30 sport action zones are so far just words; six years on, only half the money had been spent and only 12 action zones set up. So we have been here before. I ask the Minister: what is different now?

The Minister mentioned trans-fats. Does this announcement represent a change of policy from that set out by Caroline Flint in a Written Answer in January? After explaining that there was limited information on the amount of trans-fats in fast foods, she stated that the FSA had,

"no plans to carry out further analyses. Results from the National Diet and Nutrition Survey (2000-01) which looks at dietary intakes shows that intakes of trans fats are within maximum recommended intakes, whereas saturated fat intakes currently exceed public health recommendations. Consequently saturated fat intakes represent the greater...health risk and remain the priority for the Government".—[Hansard, Commons, 23/1/07; col. 1762W.]

Is that statement still accurate?

On school food, the Government spent £66 million in two years on the school fruit and vegetable scheme, yet found that this had done nothing to encourage consumption of fruit and vegetables outside the scope of the scheme. In fact, consumption at home was reported as having gone down.

On food labelling, the FSA finally published proposals for a traffic light system in 2006. With all due respect to the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, who is in his place, that was 20 months after it was first asked to do so and the proposals were immediately rejected outright by six of the leading food manufacturers and retailers. When the White Paper was launched in 2004, we argued that it would be better to have a system linked to guideline daily amounts. The Government have now accepted that proposition, abandoning what they said in 2004, but so much time has gone by that we now have a situation in which competing systems of labelling, introduced by retailers and manufacturers, are well entrenched. It is therefore likely to be a considerable time before there is any resolution of the two differing approaches. Can the Minister give the House any idea of the timescale for that?

The words "hope" and "expect" rather jump from the page when one reads the Statement. If I can follow suit, I hope the Minister will use his personal influence to ensure that the messages from this significant report are translated into sustainable public health initiatives across the country.