---

Health: Obesity

My Lords, this is one of those debates when we have a lot of old friends and a lot of themes that occur again which we have to look at. The noble Lord, Lord Pendry, displays that great political quality of persistence on this. We have to keep coming back to the subject and monitoring what the Government do, how we look at it and how we develop our approach to problems such as obesity and the relative factors of sporting activity and diet. I was cursing the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Bradford at one point during his speech because he got to the joke that I wanted to make about the fact that we seem to have produced a nation that sits on a sofa watching TV, predominantly sport and cookery programmes. We are told consistently by various chefs, whether they are selling books or trying to do a public service, or some combination of the two, that we should understand what we eat and that, if you are going to eat meat, it is probably better that it is healthy meat, both for the taste and for the sake of the animal before it becomes a lump of protein on your plate, and so on. They go on about this, but you are watching it sitting at home with a bag of crisps in front of you, the crust of a take-away pizza with far too much cheap cheese on it and several cans of lager that were sold at a discount in a supermarket. It is not a very good image, but then again, as somebody pointed out to me, historically did we ever have that great a diet? No, we did not. The British were renowned for the fact that, if we did not boil it, we fried it; to us, vegetables were exotic things that had to be boiled into submission before they could be eaten, just in case they misbehaved in some way. As the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, pointed out, we used to break a sweat when we went out to work; we actually worked and used our bodies much more. Even in getting to work and back we would invariably use muscle power. The whole process is out of whack. We are an animal that has developed a body based on muscle designed to move and do certain types of functions. If you do too much of it you will break the body down eventually, but it is designed to move and be active. We have got to a point where many people in our society are not doing this. Many people have enjoyed and do enjoy types of physical activity. Sport is a natural expression of this, as are recreational activities. There is a bizarre dividing line between exercise and sport; it does not really exist, but we try to put it in. I would say that going jogging is not sport, because you are not competing with somebody, yet on many government statistics it is. It does not matter. We are talking about certain types of recreational physical activity. I was one of the few people to be told that they had lost a few pounds over Christmas, because I now have a much fitter dog and I live out in the countryside with hills. That leads to my other point. If you happen to live in a part of the countryside where you can walk, you will take exercise because it is a pleasant activity. If you live somewhere that does not have well marked footpaths or you do not have the opportunity or a pleasant environment to do this, you will not. Of course, many people in extreme green politics would tell us to go back to a world where we live in unheated houses. Being cold and trying to keep yourself warm burns off calories; possibly we will all be a pound or two lighter at the end of the current spell of weather. Unless we can make a society where this type of taking exercise is encouraged as a pleasant leisure activity, it is not going to happen. The temptation to sit on the sofa and watch a professional athlete or a professional chef doing something is always there. We have all done it. If you have not, you are very unusual. We should also remember that eating can be seen as a leisure activity, which we have all delved into. There has to be some reason to encourage us to go out. Saying that it is good for you may make you join a gym or buy a diet plan, but it does not make you use the gym or the plan. That is the fact of the matter. Many people in the fitness industry used to make a great deal of money out of people who joined a gym and did not use it. Of course, they now realise that there was a huge greater potential in putting people on prescription activity, but I welcome their self-interest, which is possibly the nation’s self-interest here. Perhaps the Government would like to comment on how much they intend to encourage the use of gyms, predominantly in down periods, for treatment. I would be very interested. How are we going to encourage people to exercise? The noble Lords, Lord Rosser and Lord Pendry, touched on this. We have done a lot of work for the self-interest of sports to keep people coming through, trying to make sports more enjoyable, especially in the initial phases. I have bored the house silly about Rugby Union’s transition from a 15-a-side game, played at the age of 13 when the wingers froze to death and there were three people round the ball hugging on to it all the time and everybody else pretended to tackle and got out of the way, to a game that encourages minis and juniors. I thought that that was the case until I discovered my nephew at a state school announcing that he would rather be a soccer player and being told that he should play for the honour of his school—it was an honour to be there, not something for him. Despite the fact that I think that soccer is probably a second-best option, which should be considered only in a dire emergency—it helps to have your prejudice on the table occasionally—I still felt on that occasion that the school was very wrong, because it should be encouraging people to take part in a sport that they enjoy. That leads to my other point, which is where clubs are better. Clubs will make sure that you do not drop the activity at the first available opportunity. We have to work on this. How are the Government going to encourage it? What is their ongoing process? The Government have done a lot. The noble Lord, Lord Pendry, mentioned some of the projects, but the fact is that they still are not working well enough. A great deal of effort has gone in. In the debate on Tuesday, to which the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, referred, I asked which of the schemes for initiating people into a sport and encouraging them to keep active works best. I was promised an answer. The Minister who gave me that promise is sitting beside the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton. Has the Department of Health made an assessment of the best return in its terms about this? What do we have to do to deliver? Is the best option to go through the junior clubs to get the mass participation levels up? Is it things such as infrastructure? Is it making sure that parks are available and that buses take you to somewhere to go for a walk, with or without a dog? What is being done? How are we encouraging people? As my noble friend said, growing your own vegetables in allotments is popular. You are taking exercise if you do some gardening. How are the Government taking on and structuring the task of making activity pleasant? They have to do it that way. Unless we forget about 150 years of technology, most of our lives are not going to be ones of heavy manual labour. For many, there will not be even the labour of walking somewhere or riding a horse. We must to try to find a way to show that taking the right amount of exercise to keep us healthy is a pleasant experience. The challenge for this Government and anyone who supports this aim is how to integrate it into society. The structures that are needed to take in the changes and the sticks and carrots that will have to be used on society are complex. There will be more than one answer. There will not be a right answer; there will be better answers. We know that nothing is absolutely for free. I have raised sports medicine on numerous occasions in this House. Are we investing enough in sports medicine, physiotherapy and educating doctors about when to use sports medicine? I have a permanently misshapen left arm, because only a couple of years ago a consultant did not know that anything could be done about it. Apparently I am lucky that I still have function in the arm, as that might not have been the case. What are we doing about making sure that the medical profession knows about maintaining people in activity and making sure that they are not frightened, for instance, of being curtailed in work activity because of sporting activity? How is all this being integrated? We have the advantage in this House that when we ask the Government questions we do not ask individual departments. I suggest that when the noble Baroness replies she tells us how to bring these matters together. The noble Lord, Lord Davies, has told us that the Treasury takes overarching control of sport, despite the fact that it has no way of delivering. It has to go through the departments responsible for health and education and through the DCMS, which does not have much of a chance of delivering. How does that come together? Unless we take sport and recreational activity more seriously and give them more thrust, the Government are bound to waste effort. Will the Government give at least some of the answers to this great, multifaceted question?