It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) and to join in this discussion on the great subject of sugar. While listening to my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Clwyd (Dr Davies), who told us the extraordinary fact that an average five-year-old eats his own body weight in sugar during the course of a year, I considered my own children. I do not have a five-year-old—I have a six-year-old, a four-year-old and lots of others—but the six-year-old weighs 3 stone, which seems to me to be similar to the weight likely to apply to five-year-olds. That is 42 lb, or 672 oz, so if a five-year-old is eating his own body weight in sugar in a year, he is eating 1.84 oz of sugar a day, which is equivalent to 11 teaspoons of sugar. One thinks of the lines of Mary Poppins:
“Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down”,
and one wonders whether the medicine goes down even better after 11 spoonfuls of sugar.
In spite of thinking that 11 teaspoons of sugar is quite a lot, I am not in favour of sugar taxes, because I do not think it is the job of the Government to tell me how much sugar to give to my children. I think that is a matter for parents to decide for themselves, and the tax system should be there to raise the revenue the country needs to pay its way. The tax system is not there to tell us how to live our lives. There may be an exception with tobacco, but that is not really the case with alcohol, which is a matter of raising revenue. Our rates on alcohol work very well in raising revenue, as, incidentally, do those on tobacco, which is a serious generator of funds for the Treasury to pay its way.
I am sceptical about the proposed approach. I was struck by my hon. Friend’s comments that a lot of obesity is in fact genetic. If that is the case, we are penalising people who have a genetic propensity to obesity while it is fine for people like me.