My Lords, in moving Amendment 148, I will also speak to Amendments 150 and 152 in my name. There are a number of interesting amendments in this group but I intend to stick to my last, broadly, and speak only to the ones in my name.
I had a number of amendments to this schedule—it has been renumbered; it was Schedule 17 but is now Schedule 18—in Committee, but I have decided to stick with just these three. I apologise that there are three; there is only really one, of course, but the schedule is drafted in such a way that everything has to be said three times. This amendment effectively relates to high-protein, low-sugar bars. Noble Lords may wonder why I have developed an interest in such bars; to answer that, I will tell them a story. That is all I am going to do. I will tell noble Lords a story about a real business; I will then ask my noble friend the Minister a question.
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In 2015, in response to a government campaign for confectioners to develop new alternatives to overly sweet snacks, a husband and wife living near Solihull set up a company and produced a product called Grenade. In fact, its proper name is the Grenade Carb Killa. It is a high-protein, low-sugar bar. Frankly, it is not something I would particularly want to eat. It may be something that other noble Lords find equally not high on their agenda. It certainly is not marketed at children; it is largely marketed at and taken up by young people who enjoy going to the gym, exercising and doing all the things my noble friend Lord Bethell frequently illustrates himself doing on Twitter, such as plunging into cold pools in the middle of winter. What they want—perhaps my noble friend is an example of this—is an alternative on-the-go snack that is full of protein and will not give them too much sugar. That is what this product was aimed at; it was not aimed at children in any sense at all.
What is it that allows the manufacturers of this product to call it a high-protein, low-sugar bar? The answer is Regulation (EC) 1924/2006 of the European Parliament and the Council, which defines what you may call particular types of food. It says that, to be able to call something low-sugar, the product must contain
“no more than 5g of sugar per 100 g for solids”.
Similarly, it says that, to call something high-protein,
“20% of the energy value of the food”
must be “provided by protein”. Of course, the Grenade Carb Killa was carefully crafted to match these regulations so that it could be called a high-protein, low-sugar food. The product is a success. It is heavily promoted online and on social media. Not counting manufacturing staff, there are 82 staff there. The net sales are now around £35 million a year.
So what does this Bill do to its producers? I take them only as an example that I am aware of, as they have approached me and explained their business to me. First, the Bill says that the criteria set out in the EU directive will effectively cease to apply, so the parameters by which they have created their product will no longer have any effect. This was confirmed to me in what has turned out to be quite a full correspondence with my noble friend Lady Penn; let me say how I grateful I am for the effort she has put into it.
Secondly, the Bill says that the Government will now consult on whether products will be allocated to one of 15 groups set out in the draft guidance. It is by no means clear to the Grenade company which group their product might be allocated to, as the groups are very broad. One of them is “sweet biscuits”, for example, so not all food will be allocated to a group; a chicken breast will not be allocated to one of these groups because that is not what is in scope, but biscuits and things like that might be. This allocation is phase 1 of a process, as I understand it. Assuming that a product is allocated to one of those groups, it is then rated against the nutrient profiling model.
Now, noble Lords may think that we might just see some light at this point since the very high level of protein in the product should get it racing through the nutrient profiling model—but no, because the Bill requires that there should be a protein cap in the nutrient profile modelling applied to the 15 groups. This is because the Government are terrified that companies might put protein in the cornflakes and get around the regulations that way, so the large amount of protein does not help it very much at all because of the protein cap.
My noble friend may say that all this is mildly fantastical because—have I not noticed?—there is an exception for companies with fewer than 250 employees, and, as I said earlier, this company has 82 employees. The problem, however, is that two years ago, so successful were they that they were taken over by a larger company. It is now completely unclear to them—and it is not clear from the Government—whether the 250 cap applies to them as a stand-alone subsidiary or is to be applied to the larger group of which they are now part; nobody knows.
It also has some rather bizarre consequences. It means that the food that will be risky and dangerous would not have been risky had it continued to be produced by a small company—it would have been perfectly okay as long as they kept their employment down. I thought we wanted employment to go up. The second thing of course, is that no small company manufacturing compliant food will ever dare to be taken over by a larger company in the future, so this has a real consequence for business practice.
The only hope the company has is to reformulate its products, which is expensive and, as we all know, takes a long time and can go awry. Noble Lords may remember
the Cherry Coke episode, which was a disaster for the Coca-Cola company when it reformulated the product. Against what criteria will Grenade reformulate its product anyway? Nobody knows; and this sort of thing is being replicated up and down the country.
In the meantime, zealous Lords have other amendments in this group saying that what the Government really need to do—so clear is their understanding of business requirements—is move ahead more rapidly with this and have a hard deadline against which it must all be brought into effect, irrespective of the consequences for jobs, businesses and prosperity, and all to save three calories a day. So, that is my story. I am sure that the Grenade company is watching this now on parliamentlive.tv. I ask my noble friend: when I speak to the company tomorrow, what comfort can I offer? I beg to move.