Food, Poverty, Health and the Environment Committee Report

Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick Excerpts

Thursday 10th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Non-Afl) [V]]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Curry, who has such a tremendous background in farming and food. I welcome the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Sentamu, to your Lordships’ House on his return and his second maiden speech.

I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, on securing this important debate and commend him on chairing our scrutiny committee and publishing our report, Hungry for Change, in July last year. I was proud to join the committee in February 2020 as the pandemic situation was unfolding, because that was an important test whereby it was possible to assess the resilience of our food system. In May and June we had several remote meetings of the committee to deal with our report and take further evidence from government Ministers, including Health Minister Jo Churchill.

I agree with other noble Lords—the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, and the noble Lord, Lord Curry—that there should be commendation, praise and support for our food producers, whether of the land or of the sea. We should support a viable farming industry and a viable fishing industry. In that respect, it is therefore important that we as the House of Lords and Parliament be allowed to scrutinise those trade deals, because I am in no doubt that the quality of our food produce of the land and the sea is equal to, if not better than, that of the produce we may import. It is important that those safeguards are in place and, for that to happen, parliamentary protocol and parliamentary accountability are absolutely vital.

Our committee found that:

“The UK’s food system—the production, manufacture, retail and consumption of food—is failing.”


We made a series of recommendations to which other noble Lords have referred. They were all

“built around the central aim of ensuring that everyone, regardless of income, has access to a healthy and sustainable diet.”

There are stark contrasts in the way that people experience food. The report argued:

“For many people, food is the source of considerable anxiety. Significant numbers of people are unable to access the food they need, let alone access a healthy diet.”


It also highlighted that the NHS spends billions of pounds every year

“treating significant, but avoidable, levels of diet-related obesity and non-communicable disease.”

In addition, our report revealed that:

“The food industries, manufacturers, retailers and the food services sector, perpetuate the demand for less healthy, highly processed products. This not only impacts on public health, but also inhibits efforts to produce food in an environmentally sustainable way.”


The report made significant recommendations, focused on the need to initiate routine levels of food security; to make urgent changes to universal credit; to factor in the cost of a healthy diet to benefit rates; to publish consultations on

“proposals to impose restrictions on the marketing, advertising and price promotion of less healthy foods”;

to step up

“efforts to encourage the food industry to reformulate its products to reduce harmful levels of salt, sugar and unhealthy types of fats”;

to extend and reform Healthy Start vouchers, free school meals and holiday hunger programmes; and to create a standardised framework for every public good outlined in the agriculture legislation. We push and urge the Government to ensure they stand by their commitment not to

“compromise on … high environmental protection, animal welfare and food standards”

in trade agreements, to which I have already referred; and to establish an

“independent body, responsible for strategic oversight of the implementation of the National Food Strategy.”

Notwithstanding that the Government in their response are moving along our trajectory, they seem a little dilatory about implementing our recommendations. Last year they published their Childhood Obesity report; I urge the Government to implement their own recommendations. In other respects, they reacted only when Marcus Rashford shamed them into doing so in his campaign to end child food poverty and feed vulnerable children over the summer vacation amid the economic disruption caused by Covid.

Sadly, there are no real commitments on addressing the needs of the food environment or reformulation, and no engagement with the recommendation to return responsibility for nutrition labelling and reformulation programmes to the Food Standards Agency. I ask the Minister, whom I welcome back to the Dispatch Box—when we were all in the other place, he was a very good agriculture and fisheries Minister—why this is the case. Can he explain the delay in addressing these issues amid a pandemic that has exposed the fragility and insecurity of our food system?

There needs to be a root-and-branch review of the whole benefits system and a permanent uplift to universal credit. I commend the work of the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, in this regard.

In 2021 the Food Foundation published its report, The Impact of Covid-19 on Household Food Security, which in many ways chimed with recommendations in our report. It stated that

“more people are food insecure now than before the pandemic … Households with children have been hit hard, with many … still falling through the cracks in support … Existing support schemes have made a difference, but gaps have meant many people still struggle to eat adequately.”

Its recommendations, mirroring those in our report, include that the Government should review free school meal policy across the UK and ensure that

“no disadvantaged children are missing out on the benefits of a Free School Meal … Food insecurity levels are high among those in work and those on benefits”.

There is a need to increase wages, to retain the £20 uplift to universal credit and to remove that five-week wait. There is a need for proper governance structures to be in place to have

“oversight on food insecurity tracking or responsibility to tackle it.”

There has been considerable analysis of the problems with food security and insecurity and the need for people to be able to access nutritious food. There is Mr Dimbleby’s first report—we look forward to his second—our report and the report from the Food Foundation. My fear is that we could become paralysed by analysis. We now need to see the Government working with the Food Foundation, Parliament, local government and education and health authorities to bring forward and implement proposals to ensure greater accessibility to environmentally sustainable food for all at a reasonable cost.

We all need to work together to develop a food system that is resilient to systemic shocks and to safeguard our people. We need a benefits system fit for purpose that will help people climb out of poverty. We need wages to be uplifted so that those in work can afford to purchase good-quality food, and to reduce the reliance on food banks. Can the Minister outline how he, working with colleagues, intends to do just that and to implement the recommendations in our report as a matter of urgency, so that a resilient food system is accessible to all in our society?