§ Mr. MartlewTo ask the Secretary of State for Health if he will take action to ban any advertising of baby milk powders that suggests that those products are as good as or better than the baby's mother's milk.
§ Mr. DorrellThe Government are committed to the protection and promotion of breastfeeding as the best means of nurturing infants. Our policies and programmes are based on unequivocal expert advice from the Committee on Medical Aspects of Food Policy (COMA) and on the principles of the World Health Organisation's "International Code of Marketing of Breast-Milk Substitutes". The latter includes recommendations on the restriction of general advertising of baby milk powders, formally known as infant formulae.
In the United Kingdom the marketing of infant formulae is closely controlled under voluntary self-regulating arrangements which the United Kingdom manufacturers drew up in consultation with the Government in the early 1980s. It is under these arrangements that we have acted on the WHO recommendations. Details of the arrangements are set out in the publication "Code of Practice for the Marketing of Infant Formulae in the United Kingdom and Schedule for a Code Monitoring Committee". The code of practice specifically states that
no advertising should imply that infant formulae are equivalent or superior to the milk of a healthy motherand restricts such advertising to publications aimed athealth care professionals.Copies of the WHO and United Kingdom codes of practice are in the Library.