Cost of Living: Food Waste

Debate between Lord Deben and Lord Harlech

Thursday 21st September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Harlech (Con)]

My Lords, nobody wants to see good food go to waste. It harms our environment and is bad for business. The UK is an international leader on tackling food waste; we are committed to meeting the target in UN sustainable development goal 12.3, which seeks to halve global food waste at consumer and retail levels by 2030. For unavoidable food waste, the Government’s Environment Act will introduce a requirement for all local authorities and businesses in England to arrange for the collection of food waste for recycling. This will ensure that food waste can be treated through aerobic digestion or composting, delivering significant carbon savings over sending food waste to landfill.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

Food waste is a big contribution to climate change. If you do not measure things, you do not do anything about it. A company that measures its food waste is much more likely to reduce it waste. Its cost of measuring will come out of its savings in food waste measurement. At the moment, the only companies that measure are those that are doing something about it. By excluding other companies and getting rid of the mandatory arrangements, the Government have made sure that companies that are not doing anything about it do not measure it and therefore do not know and will not do anything about it.

[Lord Harlech (Con)]

My Lords, I have to disagree with my noble friend and the leading question posed by the noble Baroness earlier. We believe that the best way for companies to reduce food waste is the voluntary method we have set out in the road map. The surplus food and drink waste hierarchy is a priority scale for the use, recovery and disposal of surplus food and drink waste. At the top of the hierarchy is prevention, followed by redistribution to people in need, then animal feed, recycling in aerobic digestion plant and composting, followed by recovery of energy from waste plants. The least preferred options are disposal—for example, incineration—without energy recovery, and landfill.