Procurement Bill [HL]

Baroness Verma Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 13th July 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register. Before I speak to Amendment 66, I express my wholehearted support for the amendments so well introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter. Of course, this is a place where we see the colours of the Government, because this is how they spend their money. So, this is not about idle words—it is about hard cash and what actually happens on the ground.

Having worked in local government on a London council, I know the power of procurement—it is absolutely massive. The amendment that I am introducing—I am pleased that the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, is supporting it—is about how we can ensure the health and sustainability of food and catering services. That priority appears to be currently missing across the NPPS. My amendment sets out in subsection (3A) a range of topics that must be covered in relation to food, including the requirement to set targets on those matters. I know that the targets are a matter for the NPPS, but I have specified a minimum target, which has come from the national food strategy.

In common with other noble Lords, I see this amendment as addressing a key strategic priority, which is both nationally and locally important: that high-priority, cross-cutting topics such as sustainability and the health of our food system must be front and centre in legislation, rather than being left to a policy statement that could be changed unilaterally when we get a change of Government. While I fully accept that you have to have flexibility and be able to change, this argument applies to the technical detail and second- order priorities. It seems reasonable to assume that it is unlikely that considerations such as local and environmentally sustainable sourcing, servings and diets, or the management of resource inputs and waste outputs, will cease to be key national or local priorities, even in the medium to long term. Even were we to fully address them, we would wish to be watchful and continue to prioritise them to ensure that they remain addressed.

I have been pleased to see that the Government agree with me on the importance of this issue, hence the recent public commitment in the government food strategy to consult on extending the government buying standards for food and catering services across the whole of the public sector and the accompanying Defra consultation on how we are going to do it. The government food strategy also agrees that public sector food should be healthier, more sustainable and provided by a range of local suppliers, which will improve accountability and inform future policy changes. It also commits us to requiring public organisations to report on the food that they buy, where they serve it and what they waste. I think that this amendment is wholly uncontroversial. It simply captures the key topics that make up the buying standards.

My amendment sets one minimum target on the face of the Bill in relation to local and sustainable sourcing. The government food strategy has an aspirational target that 50% of food by value should be sustainable or local, but my assumption in setting a target of 30%, rising to 50%, is that the strategy’s target was not intended to mean that 50% of food should be local but unsustainable, with the other 50% being wholly sustainable but from miles away. I have therefore anticipated a degree of overlap from the start, until, over time, both sides meet the 50% criteria.

I do not think that there are any sensible grounds to reject this amendment on the basis that procurement authorities are wholly on top of this agenda and that a statutory footing for food and catering standards, however flexible, is therefore unnecessary. Rather, a considerable amount more might be done to strengthen the oversight of food and catering.

The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee highlighted a number of issues in its report last year. Monitoring appeared to be almost absent, no penalties were ever applied where standards were visibly not adhered to and an independent survey covered in the Select Committee report found that 60% of secondary schools were not even following the school food standards. Another report found that half of hospitals were not complying with the government buying standards—you can see why that happens when they get paid by Coca-Cola to keep a machine in their lobby, which then becomes part of a hospital’s budget.

Its conclusion was that we do not have a clear picture of how frequently and effectively buying standards are being followed by the public bodies that are mandated to follow the standards. It means that food supply chains cannot normalise around one set of baseline standards. If we put a framework for the food aspects of the NPPS on a statutory footing, it will flow down through all areas of the contracts.

Before leaving this subsection, I draw noble Lords’ attention to what has happened in one particular place in the UK—Preston. Between 2010 and 2016, the council estimated that it lost roughly 60p in every £1 from central government payments. Preston City Council identified the biggest organisations in the city—council, university, police and housing associations—and worked out that they had a combined annual spend of £750 million. In 2012-13, only £1 of every £20 stayed in the local economy. It was reworked so that, by 2017, the six local public bodies spent £38 million in Preston itself and £292 million in the area. It used the social value Act, a 2013 law that requires people who commission public services to think about how they can ensure wider social, economic and environmental gain. Local food obviously creates local jobs in horticulture, which is also set out in the Government’s response to the National Food Strategy. A target on local spend will only help to make this really work.

Proposed new subsection (3B) takes the recommendation of an updated reference diet for the nation, in line with our health and sustainability goals. As Henry Dimbleby explained in the food strategy, this diet, which he recommended to be published by the FSA working with the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, Defra and a range of other consultees, would create a single reference point and a consistent approach across government policies. The NFS observed that

“Dietary guidance in the UK is based on evidence of the health effects of individual nutrients and foods rather than overall diet”.


Therefore, it is not consistent. It continues:

“Our current Eatwell guide, the closest we have to a reference diet, does not take sustainability into account”—


at all. The absence of mandatory dietary guidance for public procurement has been widely cited as one of the reasons—in fact, probably the main reason—for the poor quality of food on offer in public settings. Creating a legal obligation for food procured by the public sector will not only avoid inconsistencies—as in an “eat as I say, not as I do” approach—but allow the Government to lead by example.

The point of all this is that it empowers local communities and farmers, creates jobs and makes children more interested in food. All the way through, it will help to change the health of our nation and put us on a much better footing. If this diet is created in the future, the Minister of the Crown who produces the NPPS would be obliged to have regard to it, which does not tie the Government’s hands or force them to carry out work they do not want to. It merely provides for joined-up governance.

With those remarks, I reiterate my belief that this amendment is completely uncontroversial and ought to meet the Government’s support. I commend it to the Minister and look forward to hearing their views.

[Baroness Verma (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott. I have already spoken to the positive case for the inclusion of climate and nature in the Bill. Amendments 65 and 546, to which I have added my name, would offer the particular benefit of providing additional stability or, if noble Lords wish, discouraging repeated tinkering through the frequent updates of the national procurement policy statement by putting the essentials of the NPPS in the Bill.

I make one other point, which relates to the contrast between the Green Paper and the language on the national procurement policy statement. The Green Paper said, strongly and correctly, that

“money spent through public procurement will be used to deliver government priorities through projects and programmes that generate economic growth, help our communities recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and tackle climate change.”

These have all been mentioned already by noble Lords. Elsewhere,

“government spending must be leveraged to play its part in the UK’s economic recovery, opening up public contracts to more small businesses and social enterprises to innovate in public service delivery, and meeting our net-zero carbon target by 2050.”

The eventual text of the current non-statutory NPPS is perhaps a little more modest in its application: it only requires contracting authorities to have regard to considering contributing to the UK’s climate target—but not to its interim carbon budgets or climate adaptation—and to considering identifying opportunities to enhance biodiversity. There are no specific environmental targets. With such a large annual spend on public procurement, this may be a missed opportunity for the Government to strengthen these provisions by instead requiring contracting authorities to have regard to actively contributing to specific climate and nature targets, rather than just considering contributing to them.