Lord Fowler
Main Page: Lord Fowler (Crossbench - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Fowler's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
(3 years, 3 months ago)
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Lord Bethell (Con)
The noble Baroness makes her point very fulsomely. We are doing a huge amount on advertising, promotions, front-of-pack nutritional labelling, out-of-home calorie labelling, alcohol calorie labelling and a whole range of stuff. The noble Baroness may well shake her head, but the truth is that this Government are doing more than any previous Government in this matter.
The Lord Speaker (Lord Fowler)
Could we have short supplementaries, please? I call the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe.
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab) [V]
My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of the all-party parliamentary group involved with the report. We recommended that the Government should build on their Better Health campaign with a public information campaign. Picking up on the last point of the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, and on the Minister’s remark that he had tweeted about the 13 streams, is not the basic problem that the public are not aware that we are trying to run a campaign and that we need a clear relaunch? This is the opportune moment to do it, when we have such problems with Covid.
Lord Bethell (Con)
The noble Lord makes an incredibly important point, and he makes it very delicately. I am extremely grateful to him for bringing this to the Chamber. It is true that many people from rural communities in the subcontinent bring with them eating habits that are simply not appropriate for modern life. We have seen that in Covid, where some of the most challenging incidences of Covid ITU have been in communities with a high level of people from the subcontinent, whose eating habits have, frankly, left them in no good state to fight this horrible disease. Tackling that issue is extremely complex, and I am extremely grateful to the Sikh community for setting this good example.
The Lord Speaker (Lord Fowler)
My Lords, the time allowed for this Question has elapsed. We now come to the third Oral Question.