Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what comparative assessment his Department has made of the environmental impact of sourcing food from British producers compared to overseas suppliers for public sector contracts.

In 2021, Defra assessed the scientific evidence on the environmental impacts of locally sourced food for public food procurement. This analysis considered the positive and negative environmental impacts of both imported and in country produced food, i.e. British. This analysis identified strong evidence and wide academic consensus that sourcing food locally does not necessarily guarantee a better environmental impact than importing: generally, production has a much greater impact on the environmental footprint of food products than the impacts of transport.