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Food Products (Marketing to Children) Bill

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (Mr. Vaizey), who made a witty, highly cogent speech on this important subject. A good place to start is recommendation 7 of the report, ““Risk, Responsibility, Regulation: Whose Risk Is It Anyway?”” produced in 2006. Recommendation 7 is that a campaign be launched"““against regulatory inconsistencies and absurdities””." If we want to take part in that campaign, we could do a lot worse than not give the Bill a Second Reading today. We have yet to hear the Minister set out the Government's approach, but having read the Prime Minister's trenchant words about the need for proportionality in regulation I should be very surprised if the Minister supported the Bill. If she did so, she would be going against all the homilies given by her Government on the subject of less and better regulation. I was waiting to see whether the hon. Member for Edinburgh, South (Nigel Griffiths) would refer to this April's FSA News when he introduced the Bill. On page 6, there is a feature on Scotland, entitled:"““Scottish children's diet too high in sugar””." It reports on a survey of 1,700 Scottish children aged between three and 16, which found that the main sources of sugar in youngsters' diets were"““soft drinks, confectionary, biscuits and cakes””," yet that the Scottish dietary target stipulated that less than 10 per cent. of the total calories consumed should be non-milk extrinsic sugars, which are added to food, drink and table sugar, and are present in fruit juices. The findings were that average NMES consumption was now 17.4 per cent. of calorie intake—higher than in 1997, when it was only 16.7 per cent. I do not know whether that has happened because the Scottish National party has become more powerful in the intervening period—the hon. Member for Angus (Mr. Weir) intervened earlier—or whether the statistics are related to political parties and policies. The report in FSA News was interesting not only for the findings that I have outlined but for stating that there is no evidence of a difference in average consumption between children who are overweight and those who are not. The FSA was obviously surprised by that and said that it could be due to the fact that, at the time of the study, youngsters were either eating less or under-reporting what they ate, thereby undermining the whole purpose of such a survey. The survey's important conclusions are contained in the report's final paragraphs. It states:"““It underlines the ongoing need for FSA Scotland to continue to work with organisations””," including"““the Scottish Government, to promote a healthy balanced diet and give children the support and information they need to make better dietary choices.””"