Food Allergens

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Thursday 26th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

My noble friend raises a serious question. We need to ensure that the information is readily available and clear. We spent some time pulling the guidance together to address a lot of the issues that he raised while ensuring that it was accessible and flexible to businesses to ensure that they had the facilities to implement it in a way that was effective for their business. I hear the points that he made and will take them back to the department when we review the efficacy of the guidance that we have produced.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, is the Minister aware of studies showing that exposure to trace amounts of potential allergens builds resilience? I think specifically of the Learning Early About Peanut Allergy study, which tracked a number of children who were thought to be vulnerable because they had intolerances to other things, eczema or other indicators. Only 3% of those exposed to trace amounts of peanuts in infancy developed the intolerance, as opposed to 17% of those who were completely denied them. We in the public eye must be careful not to send out a message in the aftermath of cases such the one that the noble Baroness, Lady Ramsey, refers to that we should clear our shelves of all potential allergens. That may be behind the increase in the number of cases that we have seen over the past 20 years.

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

Clearly, there has been an increase in hospitalisation, which is why this is such an important issue. I think the noble Lord was referring to Palforzia, where people take a tiny trace of the allergen every morning and slowly build it up in order to have a resilience to it. It is an incredibly interesting piece of research. I saw a programme on it and was fascinated at this new approach to tackling allergy. However, any new treatments must go through NICE to be approved for the NHS. We need to make sure that they work for everybody because this is a very sensitive, complex area.