Child Poverty

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Thursday 18th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

I too join others in congratulating my noble friend Lady Lister on securing this debate. Like others, I express my great gratitude to her for the lifetime of campaigning that she has undertaken on this front and the great successes that she has seen delivered latterly. I thank the Government and, in particular, our Minister for her commitment and the great work that she has done. I say that in the knowledge that there are many other things she would like to do and is still not able to do even in government. The Government have made some important steps forward, but we need more. I will not repeat what others have said about the changes that have been implemented. I was particularly interested in the quality of school meals, and the need to extend those over a wider front, as well as the breakfast clubs. The noble Baroness, Lady Nargund, made a very powerful speech indeed, particularly from a health angle.

I sometimes wonder whether our definition of poverty is somewhat narrow, and this debate has ranged over a wider front. I too would like to say something more about children’s health and the worrying developments taking place with mental health. We really ought to broaden this debate to think about spiritual poverty as well as material poverty, because this poverty strategy is based primarily on the material rather than veering towards the spiritual. I feel—I guess, I sense—that some of the problems we are facing will take us into new areas. We need, if not new responses, to dust down some of the old responses and make sure that we have better communication with the children.

I became particularly concerned about children’s health after being on the House of Lords Food, Diet and Obesity Committee. We went to Blackpool, which was quite an experience for me. My father told me I was conceived there, even though I am a Yorkshireman, and I had not been back to Blackpool for many years. It was a sorry sight, to some degree—I see people nodding in agreement—compared with what I had known of Blackpool before. We had intensive discussions with the public health officials there, looking particularly at children and the problems with housing: how the old hotels, or rather landladies’ places, have now been converted into residences for people on benefits. The scenario has completely changed compared with what I had seen previously.

Among the children, we found that there was a great difficulty with obesity. The public health officials were worried about obesity and how they could tackle it. I spent some time afterwards looking at the Government’s related policy on weight management and how we tackle people’s growing size. We have been doing this since 2008; the Labour Government introduced it then because they were worried about obesity coming along. I am sorry to say that our friends on the other side did little about it during the 14 years that they were in power. We found that, in spite of weighing and measuring children every year, the problems got worse. We now have a cohort of children in the UK who are probably the most obese in the whole of Europe. This links back to deprivation and poverty issues at home. But we also have a great problem with what we are feeding children at the moment: many of the people we would describe as being in poverty were children who were obese because of their diet—because of the cost of decent food, and so on.

The Government need to look again at why we are doing all this assessing and measuring, and getting all this data, but in fact are not taking many steps to do anything about it. What is the point in it? We get the data, but we do not do anything with it. The reason given to us in Blackpool was a shortage of public health resources: they just did not have the people available. I ask the Minister to explore whether, with the announcement we have made this week about AI and social media—that children will not be able to use technology in the same way as in the past—we are not going to miss a trick. AI, properly monitored and controlled, could possibly provide some assistance to children who have an issue with food, for example, 24 hours a day. They could refer to AI to find out what is good food for them and what is poor food. They could refer to it when they feel lonely—a lot of them felt lonely and neglected, and they were eating in those circumstances. Does the decision we have taken this week conflict with the opportunities to develop new resources, using AI, when we are not able to find the physical resources to meet the implementation of the worthy policy of weight measurement that we introduced back in 2008?