My Lords, the increasing level of obesity represents a clear and present danger to the health of our nation. I will not recite all the issues caused by obesity, but I direct anyone wanting to learn more to the Obesity Health Alliance.
Recognising this risk, Parliament has agreed on a number of tools to try to arrest, and ideally reverse, that increase, including restrictions on advertising less healthy foods which were agreed to in the Health and Care Act 2022. But while Parliament can will the ends as well as the means, in the shape of the proposed new advertising restrictions, it depends on the Executive to bring them into effect and to do so in a timely fashion, and yet we are faced here with the Government telling
us that they cannot implement what we have asked them to do for the best part of two years. This makes the Government look powerless to respond to a public health crisis that needs action right now, and their defence seems to be that they are not impotent but merely incompetent.
We can expect the Minister’s response to explain the challenges of all the different processes that they have to go through to introduce the restrictions and why these all take time. While I am generally sympathetic to the need to regulate properly by consulting with affected organisations, I am afraid that my response on this occasion has to be that my heart bleeds custard for the Government. The need to go through these various steps was entirely predictable, as these measures have been under discussion since 2018 and were formally consulted on after the Government’s much-heralded tackling obesity strategy of 2020. With the additional delay proposed today, we are looking at these measures taking seven years to get from farm to table. The Minister can have a go at explaining this, but I hope that he will not try too hard to defend it.
I expect to hear about the challenges with Ofcom’s workload. Again, I certainly understand that it is stretched by all the new work coming under the Online Safety Bill, but this delay on these regulations now risks making matters worse. It would have been better to have had this all in place before the wave of new demands comes along. I fear that we may be back here again being told that, unfortunately, there has to be a further delay while more important online safety measures take up all of Ofcom’s bandwidth. We need to ask if there is more to this delay, and if the Government are backsliding on their commitments to anti-obesity measures; they are happy to announce and reannounce them but less willing to get the job done.
We can see that there are mixed views about giving advice to people among leading Conservative Party figures, which we might describe as, “Private nannies good, nanny state bad”. But this is not a nanny-state measure, as it does not stop anyone buying or selling any food products. Rather, it is aimed at changing the environment in which people make their own choices, so that they will be, to borrow language from election law, free from coercion and undue influence.
We also have to ask cui bono—who benefits—from any policy shift, and I hope that the Minister can tell us today who from the food or advertising industries has been lobbying for the delay. If we want to consider cui malo—who is harmed—we find that the Government have just not done their homework to look into the effects of the delay, as pointed out by the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee in its 24th report, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Merron, refers in her Motion. The Explanatory Memorandum tells us in paragraph 12.3:
“A full Impact Assessment has not been prepared … because this instrument is being made only to delay the implementation date of the advertising restrictions by 33 months.”
Only 33 months—just in time for the third birthday of children being born today, whose lifetime health chances will be set during those critical early years. I wonder how long the Minister thinks a delay in legislation has to be for its impact to be worth assessing.
Even without the Government’s assessment, I do not think that any serious commentator would agree that there is no harm from this delay, as it means that there will be a longer period in which people trying to make healthier choices are exposed to messages pushing them in the opposite direction. We may not be able to quantify precisely the effect of those messages, but the promoters of less healthy foods are not stupid; they advertise only because it helps them to sell more.
This debate is obviously an opportunity for us to have a go at the Government for appearing to back-track on a measure which they said they were committed to and have previously agreed is in the public interest. I look forward to hearing other noble Lords kick their balls into this open goal.
7.45 pm
Assuming the Minister will say that the Government are still committed to a robust anti-obesity strategy, I close my remarks with a suggestion for how they might make swifter progress and look a little more competent. I assume that the first stage of developing the regulations will be to identify the extent and nature of advertising for less healthy foods that is likely to come within the scope of the new rules. This scoping and definitional exercise will have to be done quickly, if indeed it has not already happened.
Once those major advertisers have been identified, I suggest that the Government call them in and invite them to adapt their advertising strategies now, so as to be compliant with the incoming rules, rather than waiting to be ordered to do so in 2025 under threat of sanction. The Government should also then inform the public about how companies have responded to this request, so that we can judge for ourselves the extent to which each company has a sense of genuine corporate social responsibility that goes beyond mere minimal legal compliance.
Such an identify, invite and inform process—yes, that is a polite way of saying “name and shame”—could easily be done within the timeframe of 2023, based on work that will have to be carried out anyway as part of developing the regulations. I expect that businesses will want to meet with government, to lobby perhaps for slower movement on the new restrictions, creating perfect opportunities for government to lobby them back to move faster in areas where they have considerable discretion: their marketing strategies. If some of the major businesses accept an invitation to change, this could make a real difference in 2024, as well as creating a solid foundation for the order-and-enforce phase that will eventually come in 2025.
I hope that the Minister will, after the obligatory defence of the Government’s tardiness for reasons beyond their control, wish to explore this modest proposal. I beg to move.