Food Strategy White Paper

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Thursday 7th July 2022 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Boycott]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they will take to monitor the delivery of the proposals in their food strategy white paper, published on 13 June.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Benyon) (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my farming interests as set out in the register. The Government food strategy is cross-departmental. We will monitor delivery of the strategy across government, including drawing together evidence on the impacts of individual policies to determine the overall progress of the strategy. We have committed to report on how we are taking forward our actions under the strategy alongside the next UK food security report, drawing on independent analysis from the Climate Change Committee, the Food Standards Agency, and the Office for Environmental Protection.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

I thank the Minister for his reply. I am very glad that he is still in his job this morning. However, I beg to disagree. The National Food Strategy, in its original state, was a real attempt to bring food together across all the different departments. In fact, the White Paper response from the Government has put various elements back in different departments, and the one chance that we have had since the war to see food systemically as a whole has been thrown away. No one can be in any doubt that the food system is breaking: childhood obesity, health, effects on farming and biodiversity, and now an inability to get three decent meals a day by some 10 million people in this country. How can the Government call this a cross-cutting strategy?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I always defer to the noble Baroness because of her great experience and passion on this issue. However, this is absolutely a cross-government initiative. We have set up our cross-government food group, which brings together senior civil servants across government departments and the FSA to examine our strategy and monitor it on key delivery points. We will bring together the monitoring and evaluation of individual policies to enable us, and the wider population, to evaluate the food strategy and how we are performing against our targets.