Support for Local Food Infrastructure

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2022 Westminster Hall

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Robertson. For the second time today, I welcome the Minister to his place. His predecessor, the hon. Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis), always dealt in a thoughtful and dignified way with the constant questioning and assault that came her way, generally from her own side before I started. I wish her well in her new post.

I commend the hon. Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous), with whom I have worked on many issues relating to the east of England. I hope I am not doing his career prospects too much harm by saying that I agreed very much with his introduction and many of the points he made. I associate myself with his observations about the shared prosperity fund, which I suspect we shall return to on other occasions, the role of the Grocery Code Adjudicator and the review of GSCOP.

I thank the organisations that have provided briefings. It is always dangerous to give a list in case somebody is missed, but I was particularly struck by the contributions by Sustain, the NFU, the Countryside Alliance and the 3F Group in the south-west.

We are having this discussion at a time when many of our constituents are suffering great anxiety about the food bills they face now and will face in the winter. There are no two ways about it: the situation in terms of rising costs is serious. There is nothing more serious than the increasing number of people facing food poverty in the UK. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Olivia Blake) for setting out the figures, and I make no apology for repeating them. The Food Foundation told us that, as of April, 7.3 million people, including 2.6 million children, were in food poverty, and in 2021-22 the Trussell Trust supplied 2.2 million three-day emergency food parcels to food bank users. Just yesterday, the Trussell Trust released a statement with details of a survey in August that estimates that more than 2 million people skipped meals across the previous three months to keep up with other essential costs.

Those are sobering numbers. With the cost of the family shop rising week by week, I fear that the number of those experiencing food poverty and relying on food banks will increase. Although we are all extraordinarily grateful to our local food banks—I pay tribute to all the volunteers and supporters in Cambridge—it cannot be right for the Government of a rich nation like ours to rely on them to feed people. As many others have observed, our role must really be to put food banks out of business by ensuring they are no longer needed.

A couple of weeks ago, I was pleased to meet Cambridge Sustainable Food and other local food poverty charities from across the county, which shared with me a public statement voicing that very concern. They said:

“Our member organisations are experiencing a perfect storm of increases in the numbers of people seeking help with food, often people who never expected to find themselves in this position, whilst donations of food and money are reducing as people are tightening their belts. We feel that the voluntary sector is plugging gaps in state provision for vulnerable households and worry that we will not be able to cope with rising demand”.

I wholeheartedly share their concerns.

Part of the solution will be supporting local food infrastructure, as other hon. Members have described well. Labour strongly supports such initiatives. On food security for local economies, there have been a number of reports showing that money spent on local food produce results in money staying in the local area and creates more jobs per pound than if that money were spent in the supermarket. The Sustain report in July 2021 found that for every £10 spend with a local food box scheme resulted in total spending of £25 in the local area, compared with just £14 when the same amount is spent in a supermarket.

On environmental concerns, we have heard a number of excellent examples of local food infrastructure working well in constituencies up and down the country. It has been a pleasure to hear details of those schemes from colleagues, including my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Hallam.

In my constituency, CoFarm, run by founder and chief executive Gavin Shelton, is another great example. Established in 2019, it has since been successful in delivering several remarkable benefits to our local community, from tackling food insecurity to supporting the rebuilding of local biodiversity and ecosystems, as well as reducing health inequalities in an area of my city where life expectancy is 10 years lower than in the most affluent parts. I have been a regular visitor, and it is really impressive.

We know that the model of local food production works. We saw during the pandemic how local farms and local food infrastructure were able to respond to the needs of their local communities, and did so really well. Of course, that local food production will always sit alongside the wider food production system. It is not a replacement; it is complementary. It works for local economies, for the environment, and for people whose health is improved partly by the very act of participating—it really helps mental health. We want that model to be supported with Government investment, to ensure that more food can be sourced and eaten locally. As the agricultural support system is changing, it is perhaps worth reflecting on the fact that many of those small, local producers have never been supported by the systems that excluded those under five hectares. It may be time to revisit that.

There are many other things I could refer to, but in passing, I would like to pick up on some of the points made about local abattoirs. For instance, when one talks to people who want to return to mixed farming, it becomes pretty clear that it is very hard to do so without the local ability to raise livestock in the way those people would like. Sadly, I see from reading this week’s Farmers Guardian that another one has just gone—Glossop-based Mettrick’s.

Turning to the fishing sector, I very much associate myself with the comments made by the hon. Member for Waveney, and strongly commend his work with REAF. In my time as the shadow Fisheries Minister, I have been struck by the amount of fish that is driven around the country because we do not have local processing facilities, and how much more we could do—particularly with small fishers—to develop an important premium product that people would really like to have access to if we had the support to improve those facilities.

I am sure the Minister is aware that Labour’s mantra has been to make, buy and sell more in the UK; I suspect he will hear more about it—endlessly—in the coming months. It has been very well received. The future Labour Government will ask every public body to give more contracts to British firms, and will pass legislation requiring them to report on how much they are buying from domestic sources with taxpayers’ money, which we believe will help British farmers and local food producers.

We welcomed the Government’s indication in their response to the national food strategy that they were moving in a similar direction; although we were, in general, disappointed with the response to the national food strategy, that was a glimmer of hope. However, that was the previous Government. Maybe today, the Minister can confirm to us whether that is still the intention, because in the Prime Minister’s final hustings with the NFU on Friday, she rather suggested that she did not approve of top-down targets. Perhaps the Minister can tell us what the current thinking is.

We are committed to fixing the food system, in order to meet the health and environmental challenge identified by Henry Dimbleby in his national food plan; end the growing food bank scandal; ensure that all families can access healthy, affordable food; and improve our food security as a country. We want to buy, make and sell more here, and to make changes to public procurement so that our schools and hospitals are stocked with more locally sourced, healthy food. Local food infrastructure will play a vital and important role in achieving all those things.