Contribution
My Lords, I thank the Minister for her response, and I will come back to some of her comments in just a moment.
Time does not allow me to thank everyone and pick up points from all the fantastic speeches we have heard today. However, the hard-hitting speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Freeman of Steventon, reminded me that I was remiss at the beginning of my introduction to not thank her. She had the clever idea of producing a podcast to disseminate more widely the fantastic evidence that we received. I thank her for the many hours of her—absolutely free—professional advice and work. Noble Lords might be interested to know that, next week, our digital department is going to publish a short YouTube video about this debate and the Government’s response. I am going to film some of it next Tuesday.
In response to the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, I say that regulation is needed because voluntary action has failed. If the food industry does not like it, they have only themselves to blame, because they did not come up trumps when it came to voluntary targets. However, I agree that it is not the only thing that is needed and thank her for the FDTP; its work is really needed to get the metrics for measuring the achievement of mandatory health targets, which we recommended.
The noble Lord, Lord Bethell, mentioned a lot of food companies. He might be interested to know that the majority of them were invited to give us evidence and refused to do so.
I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Meyer, about markets. I spoke recently to Sadiq Khan’s health adviser, Professor Etherington, who is a long-standing GP in London. He was very keen on markets because, through them, people on low incomes can get healthy food for the same price that they might pay for unhealthy food in the supermarket. That was a very good point.
I say to the noble Lord, Lord McColl, on UPF, that the committee came down in the middle ground. We asked the Government to fund more research and to really take notice of what it comes up with. We also suggested that it would be appropriate, in dietary guidelines, to warn people that it could be dangerous to have too much UPF in their whole dietary pattern, because it pushes out wholefoods.
We had very hard-hitting speeches about children’s food from the noble Baronesses, Lady Brown of Silvertown and Lady Suttie, the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, and others. I say to the Minister that nobody can criticise a Government which do stuff to improve the diet of children, so they should go ahead and do as much as they can on that. They will not get any criticism or push-back from the population.
I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Batters, that I regret that we did not have the opportunity or time to talk about food waste—she is absolutely right about that. We had only eight months and we could not look at education, sustainable production, food security or food waste; I only wish we could have done so. However, the Minister has given me some hope. The last Government showed that you can legislate and then give time for implementation to be prepared for—the advertising ban is one of those things, although I do not think it should have taken three and a half years. I also point out to her that the IGD, which is the secretariat of the advisory committee for the food strategy, is an element of the food industry.
I am very pleased to hear that the Minister intends to keep some of our recommendations under review, and I assure her that many people in this Chamber today will also be keeping an eye on her and the Government. We will follow up in detail how many of the things that we are proposing are put into place by the Government. So it really is encouraging to hear some of the things that she has said, but there are some things that we need to watch very carefully.
I say to the Government that, if they get to the end of their five-year term of office and have not done something to improve the healthiness of the food in this country, they will suffer at the ballot box, because this is what people want. The Food, Farming and Countryside Commission has done a lot of polling on this, and it is very clear that it is what people want, so, if the Government want to win the next election, they need to do something about it. The best advice I can give the Minister has already been given by the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin: listen to Tony Blair and be bold.