Baroness Walmsley (LD)

My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 190 in my name and one or two other amendments in this group. Amendment 161 would allow auto-enrolment of families entitled to the Healthy Start prepaid card. The Healthy Start scheme provides extra cash for families on certain benefits when the mother is more than 10-weeks pregnant or has a child under four years old. The card can be used to pay for milk, formula milk, fruit, vegetables and vitamins. Families receive £4.25 per week for a pregnant woman and for each child aged one to four years old, and £8.50 for each baby under one year old—unless the Government have changed this in the last few days. The value of the payment has not increased since April 2021, despite considerable food cost inflation since then; Scotland’s similar scheme has been uprated. Some supermarkets, such as Sainsbury’s, have topped up the card with an extra £2 a week, which has been shown to increase purchases of these healthy foods. Presumably as well as increasing footfall in the shop, those supermarkets understand the importance of this extra money to the health of a young family on benefits. Even though it is not enough, it certainly helps in light of the inequalities in diet and obesity among young children below school age. In 2022-23, 12.4% of four to five year-olds in the most deprived areas were already living with obesity—more than double the number in the least deprived areas. These payments are an important lever to address this inequality. However, many eligible families do not know about their eligibility for this scheme and therefore suffer more food insecurity than they need to—I know one myself. The House of Lords Food, Diet and Obesity Committee last year heard that there are no current figures on uptake due to a “data issue”. That is just not good enough, because we know, anecdotally, that many families are missing out. The committee heard that the local authority in Blackpool was so concerned about it that it launched a programme to inform eligible families—on which I congratulate the local authority. It has now reached 80% by its calculation, which is much higher than other areas, but what about the other 20%? Its success indicates that there is a need for a national scheme.