London Child Obesity Taskforce response to the National Obesity Strategy
Last week the Government released three key pieces of strategy that hope to transform the health of the nation. The National Obesity Strategy, the National Food Strategy and the Cycling and Walking plan plus the consultation on the new Highway Code. These strategies hope to build on this moment in time as an opportunity to harness the momentum built up during the pandemic to live a better, healthier life. Creating and harnessing momentum should never be underestimated as key drivers of transformation, for they are always critical to success. These strategies are catalysts to this transformation, they are not ‘job done’.
London’s Child Obesity Taskforce has worked with children, Londoners, experts and businesses to create 10 ambitions for our city that have the potential to unleash a transformation in it so that every child can have every chance to eat a healthy diet, drink plenty of water and do plenty of physical activity. Too many children face the risk of lifelong poor health, reducing their life chances, increasing their risk of bullying and stigma and preventing them from flourishing. This is simply unfair. Our 10 ambitions, with detailed calls to action to specific leaders within them, have also started to create and harness momentum so that better, healthier lives can be lived in the city.
Our Taskforce welcomes the national strategies and the serious intent that the Government now has to tackle the obesity pandemic, and through its gatekeeper status, many other illnesses and diseases — including life chances after contracting COVID-19. We recognise that the Government is going further than ever before and creating momentum towards healthier living, but we also call for a whole system, all ages approach, listening to children and supporting them, and their families, with tough action on the societal causes of obesity.
The Government must harness the momentum it is creating, before its velocity wanes. It must ensure its energy and ideas, evident in these first steps towards helping people live healthy lives, don’t run low or stall. Our ambitions for every parent in our city include calls to Government — local and national — that they:
· Ensure all in employment receive a fair, living and liveable-off wage,
· review food voucher schemes so they offer the best value for health,
· commit that streets be safer for children and easier to walk and cycle upon,
· support new mums with breastfeeding,
· train chefs in nurseries and schools to provide healthy and nutritious food,
· encourage all schools to become water only places,
· stop marketing unhealthy food at children,
· work with fast food businesses to support our children, and
· incentivise good food innovation so it can compete with junk food!
So, as well as congratulating the Government for finally walking-the-walk in taking actions to create a healthier environment in which we can all live, we want to ensure their walk develops into an impactful and enduring long-distance run. We want to do this by encouraging, enlightening, motivating, and calling them to account by also ensuring that they tackle one of the biggest root causes of obesity, poverty. If we do not start where the problem begins with unfair and inadequate pay, then no amount of money thrown at the NHS to tackle weight loss and healthy living will ever make a difference. We cannot do what we have always done, which is push people to lose weight without making changes to the obesity inducing environment we live in and ensuring we each have the ability to adapt to this transformation.
We live in critical times, but also momentous times, and the ability of the Government and then of all us citizens to embrace, build and push on these initial announcements, will define what the consequences are for our children and grandchildren.
Written by:
Paul Lindley OBE, Chair of London’s Child Obesity Taskforce, Entrepreneur and children’s welfare campaigner
and
Professor Corinna Hawkes, Vice-Chair of London’s Child Obesity Taskforce, Director, Centre of Food Policy, City, University of London
