Food Waste

Angela Smith Excerpts

Thursday 11th June 2015 Westminster Hall

[Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Chope. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) on her re-election and on increasing her share of the vote. She has been, and I have no doubt that she will continue to be, an excellent representative for the people of Bristol and a champion for that great city. I congratulate her on securing this debate on the important subject of food waste. Her commitment to the environment is well known, and she has regularly championed in Parliament the need to tackle food waste. During the previous Parliament, she introduced a ten-minute rule Bill that highlighted this important issue.

I also welcome the Minister to his new role, and I congratulate him on his appointment. There have been a few changes at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Dan Rogerson lost his seat, and, as I understand it, the noble Lord de Mauley stepped down. I wish them both all the best in the future roles that they choose to pursue.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East spoke with her usual passion on a subject about which she clearly feels deeply. Food waste is relevant to us all, as has been clearly illustrated by the contributions to this debate. We are probably all guilty, at one point or another, of not using food as efficiently as we should or, to put it another way, of not valuing food as much as we should. I was brought up by a mother who always said to me when I wasted food, “You would not have been so wasteful during the war.” That lesson remains with me to this day. I compost and do all the things that one should do to try to minimise food waste.

None of us should be surprised that the scale of the problem is very large, but it is only part of the much wider problem of a rising population and the need to increase the supply of affordable food in a world affected by climate change and water stress—which, of course, makes it difficult to secure the food supply, to say the least. Many of us believe that we will need to grow our food more efficiently in future, with less waste and less damage to the environment, and that there will be serious consequences if we do not. As always, it will be the poorest who suffer the most if we do not address these issues.

In the UK alone, according to House of Commons Library figures, some 15 million tonnes of food is either sent for landfill or incinerated annually. It is estimated that the economic cost to households and businesses of throwing away food is some £12 billion a year, or around £480 per household. However, although the economic costs are great, the real cost of that waste is environmental or, as the noble Lord Cameron once described it, a disaster for climate change.

In the USA, for instance, it is estimated that 300 million barrels of oil a year are used to produce food that is thrown away. In the UK, it is estimated that food waste is responsible for 20 million tonnes of carbon emissions a year, or about 3% of the country’s total emissions. That figure is equivalent to the emissions produced by 20% of the country’s car usage or, to put it another way, the amount of carbon produced by some 7 million cars. Additionally, it is estimated that 70% of all water consumption is used in food production, which means that in the UK alone some 5 million cubic metres of water a year is used in producing foodstuffs, a proportion of which is wasted unnecessarily. It is therefore clear and well understood that producing food for human consumption that is then not consumed is not only costly to business and households but environmentally damaging.

The importance of food waste was recognised by the last Labour Government, who established the Waste and Resources Action Programme. One of the programme’s outcomes was the Courtauld commitment, a voluntary agreement with industry that, in phases, aimed to improve efficiency and reduce waste in the groceries sector. That approach led to successes and to reductions in waste. For example, 1.2 million tonnes of food and packaging waste was saved in phase 1 of the commitment by using new solutions and technologies. That alone is estimated to have saved £1.8 billion and cut 3.3 million tonnes of carbon emissions between 2005 and 2009. During phase 2 there was a further reduction of 1.7 million tonnes of waste, with a monetary saving of £3.1 billion, by using such initiatives as the resealable fridge pack, which the hon. Member for Rugby (Mark Pawsey) mentioned, or by increasing the shelf life of products by improving delivery and storage.

It was recognised, however, that we needed to place this important issue on a more strategic footing and to address the wider issues of food sustainability and security, so we came up with our Food 2030 strategy. The vision established by that strategy was that, by 2030, the UK would have a low carbon food system that is efficient with resources, with any waste being reused, recycled or used for energy generation. The strategy clearly set out the actions needed to reduce food waste in the supply chain and at home, and it focused on what could be done by the Government and local authorities, households and consumers, the food industry and, finally, the Government and the food industry working together.

The strategy set clear goals for 2030: reducing food waste as far as possible; addressing waste in developing countries; and valuing surplus food. On that final goal, the strategy coupled the recycling of waste food with the need to share or redistribute food to vulnerable people. That goal is now more urgent following the rapid rise in the use of food banks in the UK over the past five years, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East mentioned in her comments about FareShare.

The hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard) talked at length about Company Shop, which is headquartered in my constituency. It is a local business, and last week it received the Queen’s award for enterprise. The community shop aspect of Company Shop’s work is a relatively new innovation. Company Shop’s main business is providing surplus food from a number of supermarkets to employees working in food manufacturing and the emergency services—it is a restricted clientele. Broadly, it recycles food that would otherwise have gone to waste. Community shops are a welcome new initiative that couple access to cheap, good quality food, on the same principle as Company Shop, with positive help to get people back into work and back on their feet. I welcome that initiative, and I have visited Company Shop, which I wish all the best.

It saddens me to say that, in 2010, the incoming coalition Government decided, for whatever reason, to abandon Food 2030, effectively leaving the UK without an overall strategy to address supply, security and waste in the food industry. Not only that, but recent successes were threatened when WRAP’s funding was cut by £10 million. No wonder that, in a letter to members of the waste and resources industry, the previous Minister, Dan Rogerson, let it slip that the Government had “stepped back” from that policy area. Stepping back is not good enough, especially in the context of the huge strategic challenges that we face and the worrying increase in the number of UK citizens resorting to food banks in recent years to feed themselves and their families.

We recently heard that the Government have yet again made a partial U-turn. This time they acknowledged the need for a food strategy by announcing a 25-year plan for food and farming, which we welcome. If the Conservative manifesto is anything to go by, however, the plan might be narrowly focused and will not address the bigger issues in the same way that our Food 2030 plan clearly did. The Conservative manifesto made no mention of waste, so we now need a proper, thorough review of waste policy.

I conclude with the following questions for the Minister. What will the Government’s plan for food and farming encompass, and what progress has been made on setting it up? When might we see more details of that plan? Is he confident that the recent improvements in cutting food waste will not be lost due to the cuts his Government have made to WRAP? Moreover, are there any further plans to cut the WRAP budget?

Of course, as supply chains become longer, cutting waste successfully becomes a transnational issue that will require co-operation with trading parties, especially our European partners in the EU. At a time of great uncertainty over this country’s status in the European Union, can the Minister confirm that he will not allow any trans-European commitments to be negotiated away, and that he will continue the work started by the last Labour Government to reduce waste in food supply chains across Europe?

Seven senior waste industry, recycling and infrastructure bodies have written to the Minister, calling for a meeting to discuss future policy direction on waste. Their view is that clarity on the issue is needed from the Government. Is the Minister willing to provide that clarity? This debate is a great opportunity to do so. Will his Government make a rigorous and transparent commitment to tackling waste issues strategically and effectively?

Food waste is serious. It demonstrates market failure in the gravest of ways, it costs everyone in the country a great deal of money and it is doing immense damage to the environment. Unfortunately, this Government do not see it as a priority, and that needs to change. Food waste is a scandal. When people find it hard to access cheap, nutritious food, it is immoral for so much of this essential of life to be thrown away. That needs to change. I look forward to the Minister's answers.

--- Later in debate ---

[Angela Smith]

I am listening with great interest to the Minister. He is coming remarkably close to endorsing Food 2030. May I ask once again, what is the Government’s strategic plan on food and farming, and when will we hear more detail about it?

[Rory Stewart]

The answer is that I am going to evade that question. We do not yet have that plan, and I am not yet in a position to give the hon. Lady a deadline on it, but I promise her that we are thinking hard about the subject. I am happy to sit down with her and talk about where we have got to with that thought and take on any suggestions that she has.

Food to the value of £108 billion and the one in eight jobs connected to food and farming in the UK are connected to what every hon. Member in this Chamber deeply believes in, whether it be poverty alleviation, mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys; the legislative programmes advocated by the hon. Member for Bristol East; the important arguments on the environment and resource depletion advanced by the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion; or the civil society examples from Zero Waste Scotland produced by the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West.[Official Report, 15 June 2015, Vol. 597, c. 1-MC.]

I want to end with a huge invitation. I do not see why this need be a party political issue. There is obviously an enormous amount of knowledge in this room and I should be delighted to sit down with anybody who has good ideas about what we could do to tackle something that matters deeply to British citizens, the food industry and the packaging industry, and which matters deeply in respect of the resources on which our biosphere depends.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered tackling food waste.