Support for Local Food Infrastructure

Anthony Mangnall Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2022 Westminster Hall

[Anthony Mangnall (Totnes) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow my right hon. Friend the Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale). I agree with absolutely everything he said. The Campaign to Protect Rural England talks about there being 1.3 million acres of brownfield sites across the UK, which plays well to his point that we should look at those sites and at buildings for solar panels rather than using green fields.

It is also a pleasure to speak in this debate, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous) on securing it. It is a timely debate, because of covid, the supply chain problems that we have had and the cost of living, and also because support for our farmers and our fishermen is absolutely essential. I pay tribute to the previous Chair of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, Neil Parish, for his work on this matter in the reports published by the Committee late last year. The work of that Committee has been absolutely tremendous and it has made a number of good suggestions.

I welcome the Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood (Mark Spencer), to his place. It is really welcome news that we have a farmer in that role; I know that my farmers are delighted he is there, and I hope that he will come down and visit us.

The subject of this debate cuts through to the very heart of localism in terms of our approach to and support for local businesses. Dare I say that I think we ought to be a little bit more French? It is not often that I am supportive of some of the measures that the French Government put in place, but one thing that can be seen in local communities across France is how they support local farmers and local producers within their communities —indeed, there are not as many supermarkets in the surrounding areas as are found elsewhere.

That French appetite for, interest in and manner of operating with their own farmers and fishermen must be replicated in the UK. We have been talking about localism for the last 12 years and we now have a real opportunity to implement it. My hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Jo Gideon) discussed how we talk about food and how we encourage people to learn how to cook. Actually, an extraordinary number of opportunities for people to learn have already been provided by the private sector. There is a small group called Cookable, which helps people in schools and in workplaces by giving them better lessons on how to cook and how to have better engagement with the food they eat. On top of that, we have to think about how we educate people about the food they eat and where it comes from. What programmes can be put in place in schools to get children on to farms and fishing boats to ensure that people are more aware of the fact that the good-quality food we produce in this country is worth supporting and eating?

I will spend most of my time today talking about the south-west food hub. In 2014, David Cameron launched a plan for public procurement. The plan was that £1.2 billion worth of food should be bought by the public sector, improving standards. In response to that plan, the Crown Commercial Service committed to introducing a dynamic purchasing system to allow SMEs to register for Government contracts. In 2016, that was successfully piloted in Bath and north-east Somerset. The pilot demonstrated that food costs did not increase when buying from local SMEs, and it generated cost savings of 6% in the first year due to increased transparency and shorter supply chains.

Due to that pilot, the south-west food hub was selected by the Crown Commercial Services to do a scaled-up pilot. Unfortunately, the CCS has now reneged on its agreement with the south-west food hub and the hub has been dropped. That is a real mistake, because there is an opportunity here, with an organisation that is already set up, to build on two successful pilot schemes to ensure we get better local homegrown food into the stomachs of our constituents and on to the shelves of our shops. We have to have a long-term strategy about that. We are doing it for oil and gas and we are doing it for our energy infrastructure. Let us think about how we can do it for our food production and how we can support our farmers and fishermen.

It is interesting that in the Agriculture Act 2020 there is a requirement for the Secretary of State to come forward and talk about food security. I really hope that is going to happen this autumn—the time is now. It is a perfect opportunity for us to talk about how we can improve the self-sustainability of the United Kingdom, and our own food security. It is levelling up in the perfect form. It will not even cost us money.

[Mr Laurence Robertson (in the Chair)]

Thank you to everyone for sticking to time. We come to the Front-Bench contributions. I would like to leave two minutes at the end for the mover of the motion to sum up.