English Flood Defences

Debate between Lord Benyon and Baroness Walmsley

Thursday 30th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

As the noble Baroness says, we have put record amounts into flood protection through the Environment Agency—£5.2 billion from 2021-27, which is a doubling of the investment. Additionally, there is an extra £200 million on maintenance, a £22 million increase in the maintenance fund this year and the Environment Agency is conducting a review, expecting around 69,200 high-consequence assets, of which 63,700 are at the required condition. We are not complacent. We recognise that there is an increased threat from flooding, as there is from a variety of extreme weather conditions. We have made this a priority for government and will continue to support the Environment Agency with what it needs to keep our homes safe from flooding.

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, I will follow on the Minister’s answer to the question from the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering. Given that we already have houses built on flood plains and that there will probably be more, what are the Government doing to mandate resilient design—he hinted that other countries have done that—and to retrofit houses that have already been built there? Things can be done, such as laying concrete flooring and raising the level of the electricity circuits. Will the Government ensure that this sort of design is built in when it becomes necessary to build new houses on flood plains?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I totally agree. Through our conversations on housing design and the incentives and financial support that we give to householders to retrofit, we are seeing those householders protect their houses themselves. In flood-risk areas, where you put the plug sockets can make a difference if a house floods, so recovery funding must also drive that. We must listen to the Environment Agency when it says that developments should not take place, but if the developer, working with the local authority, and the Environment Agency, says that these mitigation measures have been put in place, we will copy what goes on in places such as the Mississippi basin and the Netherlands, where there is intelligent building in flood-risk areas.

Nutrition for Growth Summit 2024

Debate between Lord Benyon and Baroness Walmsley

Wednesday 29th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

We think that the nutrition for growth dialogue on an annual basis, holding ourselves to account, is really important. We co-hosted the global food security summit, which was held last week in Lancaster House, with Somalia and the United Arab Emirates. The nutrition for growth proposal is that the next meeting should take place in Paris. We are working very closely with the French on this. My colleague, Andrew Mitchell, has met with them and with the director general, Melinda Bohannon, to try to work out how we can make this next phase really effective. In the short time that I have been in the department, I have seen how transparent we are in the quantities that we give and how we explain it. I hope that noble Lords will look at the White Paper and see how we are working with so many other different parties, particularly civil society, in achieving this.

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, the Minister will be aware of the good work being done by Gavi on vaccination across the world. However, is he aware that Gavi is now aware of the link between vaccination effectiveness and nutrition in children? Undernourished children do not have as beneficial a response to the vaccination as they should. That is why Gavi has now linked the two things in its campaigning. Will the Government support that?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The noble Baroness says much more eloquently what I was trying to say earlier. If you deal with various other health outcomes, you have a much better chance of getting a sustained improvement, for children in particular. I absolutely agree with what she says and I am very happy to work with Gavi on this.

Government Food Strategy

Debate between Lord Benyon and Baroness Walmsley

Monday 13th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, there is much to say about this “Let them eat venison” food strategy—although there is not a lot of meat in it. It is full of vague intentions and grand promises such as a school food revolution. It seems to me that when this Government want to hide the fact that they have chickened out of doing something really revolutionary, they call it a revolution. Sadly, they have failed to do justice to Henry Dimbleby’s thoughtful, realistic and ambitious national food plan. No wonder he is disappointed that only half his recommendations have found favour with the Government.

Our national food system is broken. If your Lordships do not believe me, ask the NHS workers who are forced to use the food bank set up by the hospital where they work. Ask the person who has three jobs, trying to put food on the table but able to afford only cheap food or ready meals because there is no time left to cook. Ask the doctors who treat the 40% of overweight children and the 64% of overweight adults. Ask the nurses who treated the large number of people with obesity who died of Covid-19 at the height of the pandemic.

Henry Dimbleby recommended a food system to make people well, not one that would make them sick, while at the same time protecting the environment. Yet what do we have in response? Twenty-seven pages that ignore evidence-based measures such as introducing a sugar and salt tax, an idea that the soft drinks industry levy has shown to be an effective way of incentivising manufacturers to reformulate and reduce sugar in order to avoid the tax. Tonnes of sugar have been cut from the diets of children and teenagers, while people drink just as many soft drinks and the industry has not suffered at all. However, despite that success, the amount of sugar the average person eats is continuing to rise because of the increase in consumption of junk foods laced with sugar, salt and other appetite stimulants. So why will the Government not follow the sugar tax idea with other foods? Can the Minister say who has been lobbying the Government to ditch this recommendation? Is it the same people who succeeded in persuading the Government to delay the implementation of the ban on TV and online advertising and volume promotions of HFSS foods before the ink was dry on the Health and Care Act?

The price of food is rising but there is no evidence that a salt and sugar tax would increase it. I spoke yesterday to someone in the food industry who was convinced that it would encourage reductions in salt, and particularly in sugar, without price rises. If the Government want to reduce taxes, perhaps they should start with the inflated amounts of VAT that are flowing into their coffers from our fuel and energy purchases; that would help families directly.

During the passage of the Health and Care Act, there was a great deal of talk about what the new integrated care systems could do to address the health inequalities crisis. We know that obesity is more common among poorer people, yet this so-called strategy will do nothing to help them afford healthy food. We are told that a healthy diet would cost five times what the poorest families can afford, but the sugar and salt tax could pay for some of the measures that Dimbleby proposed to balance things out. Extending the Healthy Start programme and eligibility for free school meals and the holiday activity and food scheme would help to get fruit and vegetables into the diets of poor families, yet there are no proposals about that. Why not?

The Government talk about willpower, information and education for consumers, yet we have had health education in school for years, as well as food labelling. It has not worked. When the soft drinks levy was introduced, Liz Truss objected, saying that people should be free to choose. However, the problem is that people are not free to choose healthy food because they cannot afford it; they can only afford cheap calories. In some housing estates, almost the whole row of shops consists of junk food outlets. Where is the choice there? It is a matter not of will power but of affordability and availability.

The Government have a responsibility here. I was amazed to read in the White Paper that the cost of food is not a matter for government. Does the Minister really believe that? Of course it is, when people are getting sick, putting pressure on the NHS and costing the taxpayer a lot of money. I do not expect this Government to care about poor people losing years of life because of poor diet, but I would have thought they would understand the economic case for ensuring a healthy and productive population. Achieving the Government’s own ambition of five extra years of healthy life by 2030 is nowhere near on track, especially in the lower demographic groups.

Neither is there anything concrete in the White Paper to help farmers produce good food more efficiently, while protecting the environment. Farmers are already up in arms about what they are being asked to do without extra support, and worried about competition from large farms in Australia and New Zealand. Subsidies have been cut by 20% and the Government are still not clear about the details of the environmental land management payments.

Your Lordships’ Science and Technology Select Committee, in its report on nature-based solutions to net zero, said that farmers need a free and independent expert advice service to help them improve their productivity while improving biodiversity, but all we have is an alphabet soup of schemes and funds—and nowhere in the food strategy could I see the word “soil”. Another of Dimbleby’s recommendations that is notable for its absence is that we should aim to eat at least 30% less meat, given that 85% of our agricultural land is used to feed animals. Apart from the ridiculous “Let them eat venison” proposal, I see nothing practical to achieve that.

We are offered more research on things that we already know and more reviews about things that do not need reviewing—nothing but delay and equivocation. What a missed opportunity.

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I am grateful to the two Front-Bench spokesmen for their responses, but I wonder whether they have read the same report as I have. On food poverty, the first point that I would make is that I hope the noble Baroness does not really believe what she just said about poor people, because I find it extraordinary to assume that people like myself do not care about people on low incomes. That was a very direct statement and one that, in time, I hope she might recant.

A great many families are suffering at the moment for a variety of reasons but principally because of other constraints on household incomes, particularly in terms of energy. It is for that reason that the Chancellor recently announced £15 billion of support for households and continued other measures right across the concerns that households have about their incomes. Food is a significant part of household expenditure, though it is actually lower in this country than in many others and has stayed stable, at around 16%. It is creeping up, which is a matter of genuine concern for people on all sides of this House. We want to do what we can to help those families tackle these problems.

The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, mentioned free school meals and eligibility. The threshold must be set somewhere. We believe that the level we have selected, which enables more children to benefit while remaining affordable and deliverable for schools, is the right one. For a typical family on universal credit, the current £7,400 earned income threshold, depending on exact circumstances, equates to an annual household income of between £18,000 and £24,000 when benefits are taken into account. To be effective, welfare benefits should encourage people to take up work while supporting them to do so. We need to avoid creating a cliff-edge disincentive whereby people cannot afford to take up work, which is what a significant increase in the scope and funding of free school meals is likely to do. However, from 24 March this year we have made permanent the extension of free school meals eligibility to include some children from groups who have no recourse to public funds.

The noble Baroness asked about crops rotting in the fields. We work very closely with the industry on the demand for seasonal workers. For that reason, we have increased the number of seasonal workers visas, by 10,000, to 40,000. She will be aware that a large proportion of our seasonal workers came from Ukraine, and that is why we have spread out the countries where we are offering these visas to fill that gap. Let us be frank: many of those people are remaining to fight or have other reasons as they deal with that tragedy in their country.

The noble Baroness talked about trade. I would just add that we are keeping to our pledge that we will maintain animal welfare and environmental standards on the imports that we receive under trade deals.

The unsexy thing to talk about in this place is data, but data actually matters and the food industry has access to a large amount of data. By working with the food industry and through the food data transparency partnership, we are giving consumers the information they need to make more sustainable and ethical, and healthier, choices. We are talking to the industry about expanding animal welfare labelling to help consumers, but it is important that people have that data on what they are eating, where it comes from and what it contains.

On dealing with unhealthy foods, which were rightly pointed out in the Henry Dimbleby report, the Government are taking forward a variety of policies. For example, we have seen the amount of sugar in cereals and yoghurts reduced by 13% since we brought in changes there, while the addition of calorie counts on menus is making choice better for people. Later this year, we are also bringing in a ban on poor quality foods being available at checkouts.

The noble Baroness for the Liberal Democrats made a point about subsidies being cut; no subsidies have been cut. The support system for agriculture is ring-fenced at £2.5 billion to the end of this Parliament. That is a commitment that was given and will continue to be given. We are developing a range of supports encouraging farmers to be innovative and to tackle the ardent ambition that more quality food should be produced from home.

Finally, on the noble Baroness’s point about soils, I could bore this House for weeks about what we are doing on soils. She only has to look at our soils standard in the sustainable farming incentive to see how important soils are in trying to reconnect some in agriculture, who have lost that connection with the soil, to produce healthy food and make ecosystems and the environment function as two sides of the same coin with food production.

National Food Strategy

Debate between Lord Benyon and Baroness Walmsley

Thursday 24th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The food strategy sits within the wider intention of the Government, with cross-party support, to ensure that we have the most sustainable and highest standards in all areas of food production. That requires the corporate organisations such as the ones that the noble Lord recognises to understand that there is no safe place for them if they break those rules in this part of the global economy.

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, will the Government’s response also include a land use strategy, which was recommended recently by your Lordships’ Science and Technology Committee, in its report on nature-based solutions to climate change? Given the increasing pressure on land use, is it not important to recognise the pressure to grow more foods and fuels sustainably, and build houses and land for industry and infrastructure, alongside the need to set aside certain land for conservation of biodiversity? We need a land use strategy. Will the Government come forward with one?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

This is a moment of almost revolutionary change in agriculture, not only in how we support and incentivise farmers but in how we produce food. What was so impressive about Henry Dimbleby’s work, and what will be reflected in the food strategy, is that we are looking at the entire food system—yes, the impact that our food production has on the environment but also the effect it has on people and diet, so the whole food chain.

National Food Strategy Independent Review

Debate between Lord Benyon and Baroness Walmsley

Tuesday 20th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

My Lords, Henry Dimbleby’s report was focused on England, but he worked very closely with the devolved Administrations as well. Our food network and supply chains are interwoven, as they are with the European Union and beyond, so we absolutely will.

[Baroness Walmsley (LD) [V]]

My Lords, will the White Paper include ensuring that people without gardens who wish to grow their own healthy food have access to land for allotments without having to pay high fees? Will local authorities be funded to provide these facilities in the interests of public health and to encourage school gardens? Does the Minister accept that children who grow vegetables eat vegetables?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

Getting children used to the production of food is a vital part of helping them to enjoy it, so I am absolutely on the same side as the noble Baroness. I would like to see a great many more schemes being developed. It is probably not for the Minister to do this from here, as local schemes are best suited, but I will work with other departments to make sure that that is happening.