Health and Care Bill

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 2 & Report stage
Monday 7th March 2022 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Moylan]

148: Schedule 18, page 254, line 34, after “State” insert “which may not include products containing more than 20% of their calorific value by way of protein and not more than 5 grams of sugar per 100 grams in their composition”
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment, along with others to Schedule 18, ensures that foods that can be advertised as “low sugar” and “high protein” under Regulation (EC) No 1924/2006 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 20 December 2006 on nutrition and health claims made on foods are exempt from the restrictions on advertising proposed in that Schedule.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 148, I will also speak to Amendments 150 and 152 in my name. There are a number of interesting amendments in this group but I intend to stick to my last, broadly, and speak only to the ones in my name.

I had a number of amendments to this schedule—it has been renumbered; it was Schedule 17 but is now Schedule 18—in Committee, but I have decided to stick with just these three. I apologise that there are three; there is only really one, of course, but the schedule is drafted in such a way that everything has to be said three times. This amendment effectively relates to high-protein, low-sugar bars. Noble Lords may wonder why I have developed an interest in such bars; to answer that, I will tell them a story. That is all I am going to do. I will tell noble Lords a story about a real business; I will then ask my noble friend the Minister a question.

--- Later in debate ---

Therefore, I hope that my noble friend can withdraw his amendment, and that other noble Lords will not move theirs when they are reached.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, especially at this time of night, it is very taxing to try to summarise what is a complex debate raging across a number of issues, and in particular to thank everyone who has spoken. If I fail to thank everybody by name, I hope I will be forgiven in the interests of brevity, but I thank my noble friend the Minister again, not only for her remarks but for the attention, care and hard work she has put into addressing all these issues with me and many other noble Lords who have spoken on the various topics we are addressing.

I have to thank one or two other noble Lords. In particular, I express my gratitude to the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, who went out, no doubt at considerable personal risk and with some arduousness, to purchase an example of the Grenade Carb Killa. I had never seen one in captivity or in nature until he produced it in the Chamber today. That in itself is something I am very grateful for. He chose the one that I think is called “white chocolate” or something like that.

Here the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, has been helpful to me. I believe there are 14 different flavours of Grenade Carb Killa. It is the view of the confectioner that manufactures them that some will comply with the profiling model while others will not. Perhaps next time the noble Lord could try a different flavour and have it tested in Liverpool, I think it was, and that would generally help to advance things. The difficulty for the company, though, is that this is not a game. It needs to know which of these products has to be reformulated and how for it to remain compliant and stay in business. This was a very helpful illustration of the difficulties.

One other noble Lord I will mention is my noble friend Lord Bethell, who referred to the tobacco advertising ban as if it were some sort of comparison. There is no comparison. Nobody had to carry out a profiling exercise to decide whether something was a cigarette: it was a cigarette or it was not. There was no question of putting it through a model to discover it was a cigarette. Nobody in the cigarette manufacturing business had to reformulate their product and market test it to make it compliant with regulations. What you can do with a tobacco ban very quickly is simply irrelevant to the hurdles the Government are setting in front of businesses.

Apart from that, the many noble Lords who spoke on other aspects of the Bill, some with great knowledge and experience, have illustrated something that I hope everyone in the House can agree on, with the possible exception of my noble friends on the Front Bench: it really is a crying shame that issues of such importance and complexity should be rammed into a major Bill in a schedule when in fact it must be clear to us all now that this schedule should really have been a Bill in its own right, and should have received the attention and scrutiny these complex commercial and nutritional issues deserve. With that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 148 withdrawn.