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Obesity

My Lords, the noble Baroness brings up one of the priorities in the Foresight report, which is to look at labelling more carefully. I remind the House that we lead on food labelling globally. We should be proud of that, but we could do better. We will work with the Food Standards Agency and the food industry—it needs to be a partnership—to introduce front-of-pack labelling that makes it simpler for families to make healthier food choices. Our preferred model, developed by the Food Standards Agency, is based on the traffic light system, which consumers find easy to understand. This has already been adopted by many major retailers and manufacturers such as Sainsbury’s, Marks and Spencer and Waitrose. A rival scheme, based on the guideline daily amounts, was touched on by the noble Earl, Lord Howe, and is used by a number of other manufacturers and retailers such as Asda and Tesco. We believe that the GDA model is confusing to consumers, particularly those with poor numeracy skills. Last month Defra launched its Year of Food and Farming education programme which aims to give young people direct experience of the food chain to encourage healthy eating. We can do more. I agree that we need more evidence and that we need to monitor the progress of food labelling and its impact on the uptake of children and their families.