Environment Bill

Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 5th July 2021 Lords Chamber

I hope I have gone some way at least toward reassuring noble Lords that the Government share their commitment to reduce food waste, through this Bill and through action that we have taken and will be taking. I therefore respectfully request that the noble Baroness withdraws her amendment.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall) (Lab)]

My Lords, I have no requests to speak after the Minister, so I call the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

I thank your Lordships, and the Minister, whose final words were telling in that the Government have gone some way towards fixing this problem. I congratulate the Government on all the work which has been done through WRAP. The Love Food Hate Waste campaign has been terrific. However, the target is not high enough, and all sorts of things are not yet good enough.

I thank the noble Lords who have spoken in this debate, in particular the noble Earl, Lord Caithness. I completely agree with him that the food waste at the top of the supply chain is one of the biggest culprits lurking out there, and that we must get at it. In social supermarkets which I have set up, we extracted extraordinary amounts of products which were useless because the labelling was wrong, advertising the football, for example. Where does that food go? That is where we really need government support and transparency.

I was interested in what the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, said, and I agree with her that energy from waste is a very good way to describe it. I know that Ludlow at one point ran its school bus on the food waste which people put in buckets at the ends of their drives. It was very effective because people got involved, and it helped them to understand that there is proper energy, life and all sorts of good stuff in food. As she said, I indeed have lots of relatives in Denmark who are unbelievably good about it, and also do bottle deposit schemes.

I found myself in complete agreement with the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, that it should apply to every sort of supermarket.d I disagree with him only when he mentioned the catering industry. On the whole, caterers are very canny with their money, and tend to get the right amount of food to feed people. I am always incredibly impressed when I find myself in the same place as a caterer. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, although I wonder where his children were. Were they on the roof, or was it some birds? I saw a whole load of storks this weekend, not far from Eastbourne—perhaps they came down to feed on his waste food, as they are very hungry all the time. He was completely right about plastic packaging—we must use less.

As always, the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, said the key things, noting that the public are far ahead of the Government on this. We all want this. This has to be done, because we must get at the industry. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, for her support. I echo her view about the coming summer holidays, which should be lovely, but are in fact scary for a huge number of parents. Supermarkets should know how much to get, and not wait for the cookery shows.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, gave a fantastic speech. I am so glad to get all that incredible data on the record. I did not know the statistic about one in five cars, which is really staggering—so I thank her for that.

I shall leave noble Lords with a couple of thoughts about France. Data obtained by the Independent from the Carrefour supermarket chain, the second largest in France with a socking great 20% market share, shows that in 2020 it donated 30,371 tonnes of food from its supermarkets, the equivalent of 72 million meals, meaning that a single French supermarket exceeded the donations of all 10 UK supermarkets by more than 6,000 tonnes. France is now ranked number one by the Food Sustainability Index.

The point about that is that people really liked it. It is a very popular law. Meanwhile, the UK’s top 10 chains donated less than 9% of their surplus food for human consumption. We could really change this. After the end of this pandemic, for the Government to say “This is going to go into law” would be incredibly popular. The supermarkets are already three-quarters of the way along the road, and if we can take on board the fact that it should be all of them, we would have a win that would be a good one. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

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Clauses 68 to 71 agreed.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall) (Lab)]

My Lords, we come now to the group beginning with Amendment 150A. Anyone wishing to press this or anything else in this group to a Division must make that clear in debate.

Amendment 150A

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