The former health minister Lord Bethell says junk food companies “should be seen for what they are – a leech on our public finances… and a threat to both our national security and our public finances”.
The Conservative peer made the comments in a speech to House of Lords last week in which he sharply criticised the Government’s response to the House of Lords Food, Diet and Obesity Committee’s report Recipe for Health: a plan to fix our broken food system. The report, published in October, warned about an “utter failure to tackle a public health emergency of obesity and diet related disease”.
The Lords’ report has been widely hailed as a landmark document by public health campaigners, but Lord Bethell says Ministers have effectively “given it two fingers”.
In his speech, he said the junk food industry “can no longer be regarded as a constructive contributor to a national interest, or a benign employer of our people, or a supplier of nutritious sustenance to feed our people”. While multinational food corporations make billions of pounds in profits, children in Britain faced a lifetime of ill health and addiction, he added.
He told Peers: “The NHS is running nearly a hundred child obesity clinics, at great expense, the UK workforce is quitting employment because of the cardiovascular, MSK and consequential mental health problems associated with obesity.
“The junk food giants should be regarded as a leech on our public finances, a free rider that is not paying for the externalities they create, and or a threat to both our national security and public finances.”
Lord Bethell cited correspondence he has had with the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) on the wider impacts of the costs of Britain’s obesity crisis. “It wrote that the rising tide of chronic health conditions linked to obesity is increasing the years that people spend in ill-health, and that is having a material impact on our ability to sustain the national debt. The Army cannot recruit fit soldiers; our businesses cannot find a fit workforce; and our communities are struggling to cope with obesity-related poor health—we simply cannot go on like this.”
A notable conclusion of the Lords report was that “misguided fears” over so-called ‘nanny state’ policies (and sometimes ideological opposition to them) have placed too much of an emphasis on personal choice rather than tackling the underlying drivers of unhealthy diets. Picking up on this in a subsequent LinkedIn post, Lord Bethell said: “Polling evidence overwhelmingly points to strong support for government interventions,” adding that “major civic organisations, including children’s charities and the health champions, are clamouring for action”.