Food Waste

Caroline Lucas Excerpts

Thursday 11th June 2015 Westminster Hall

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered tackling food waste.

Back in 2012, I introduced a ten-minute rule Bill on food waste. It was a collaborative effort, supported by Feedback—known then as Feeding the 5000—FareShare and FoodCycle, as well as Friends of the Earth and the World Wide Fund for Nature UK. The Bill received strong cross-party backing. I was then, and still am, a proud patron of FoodCycle and wanted to advance proposals that would increase the amount of food available for redistribution.

Although the Bill inevitably fell at the end of the parliamentary Session, I have continued to campaign for its provisions, and it feels timely to revisit the issue now for a number of reasons. France, for example, has just passed a food waste law. Belgium, back in May 2014, was the first European country to pass such a law, but the French law has gained more attention. It started with Arash Derambarsh, a local councillor representing a suburb in Paris, who set up a petition against food waste that got more than 200,000 signatures. The petition was triggered by the fact that supermarkets were pouring bleach on to edible food before binning it in order to prevent people from foraging in the bins to feed themselves. As some may remember, people were prosecuted in the UK for foraging in the bins behind an Iceland shop, which happened to be next to a police station. Although they were caught, Iceland, to its credit, asked the police to drop charges. That situation was similar to the one in France, although it did not involve bleach.

In France, the incident and petition led to the National Assembly passing new legislation that requires French supermarkets to partner with charities to donate food that is approaching its “best before” date. Although many supermarkets in France already do that, the proposals enshrine the practice in law. News reports now say that the councillor in question is hoping to take the issue to the UN conference on the sustainable development goals later this year and to the G20 summit in Turkey in November.

The French move has inspired a number of petitions in the UK calling for similar laws here. For example, one, through 38 Degrees, has garnered just under 180,000 signatures in a very short space of time. My hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier) has tabled an early-day motion calling on the UK to introduce similar legislation. So far, that has attracted 36 signatures.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this important debate. Does she agree that as well as dealing with food waste downstream, once it has arrived at the supermarket, we need to intervene higher up the chain? Statistics show that between 20% and 40% of fruit and vegetables are rejected by supermarkets before they even get to the shelves, so it is part of a much longer process as well.

[Kerry McCarthy]

I am very pleased to see the hon. Lady in her place, not least because at the recent general election, the Greens campaigned in Bristol on the slogan: vote Green to “keep Labour honest”—so if she was not here today, who knows what nonsense I might come out with? However, she makes a valid point. I will speak later about how there has been so much focus on household food waste, but actually, this issue goes way back through the supply chain, as far as the dealings between farms and supermarkets.

Bermuda has recently passed legislation along the lines of the 1996 US legislation, the Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, which protects food donors and recipient organisations from civil and criminal liability when food has been donated in good faith. That was seen as important back then, because many potential donors and potential recipients were deterred by the fact that they might be held accountable if anything went wrong.

The excellent report of the all-party parliamentary inquiry into hunger in the UK, “Feeding Britain”, said that redistributing surplus food better would be the “next big breakthrough” in eliminating hunger in the UK. In particular, it recommended that food retailers and manufacturers should be set a target of doubling the proportion of surplus food that they redistribute to food assistance providers.

Last week saw the launch of the FareShare FoodCloud app, which will enable Tesco store managers to alert charities to the surplus food that they have at the end of each day. If a charity is interested in that food, it can get in touch and collect it free of charge. A surplus food summit organised by FareShare is taking place next week. It will promote the new tool and is aimed at inspiring suppliers to step up their own efforts to redistribute their food.

All that is very welcome, and it is the reason why I wanted to secure today’s debate. However, I want to go back to why reducing food waste is so important. We know that somewhere between 30% and 50% of all food globally is wasted. That surplus has an environmental footprint. It puts pressure on scarce land and resources, contributes to deforestation and needlessly adds to global greenhouse gas emissions. If food waste were a country, it would be the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases behind the US and China. It is also unsustainable if we are to meet the global challenge of feeding a growing population from an increasingly scarce agricultural resource base. It is, of course, indefensible that good food is thrown away when so many are turning to food banks, because they cannot afford to feed themselves or their families.

--- Later in debate ---

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

It is a pleasure to speak while you are in the Chair, Mr Chope. I congratulate the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) on securing this important debate. She has huge expertise, and I greatly admire the important work that she has been doing in Parliament on food policy and food waste for many years. I have no doubts whatever about her honesty, so I shall report back to Bristol East in those terms.

I also admire the huge number of inspirational projects going on in Brighton on food waste and food poverty. I shall highlight just a few of those before talking about some of the priorities for Government action on food waste and food poverty in the UK.

Last Friday, I had what was probably the best lunch I have had since becoming an MP. I was meeting a constituent. She was the person who started the 38 Degrees petition, mentioned by the hon. Lady, that calls for legislation to make supermarkets donate their leftover products that are still safe to eat to charities, food banks and so on. My constituent and I met at Brighton’s Real Junk Food Project café, a groundbreaking community project that intercepts food destined for landfill and turns it into healthy meals. The queue for that café was quickly out of the door and down the road. Everyone is welcome, from local workers and students to low-income families and homeless people.

We were joined by Adam Buckingham, who founded the Real Junk Food Project in Brighton, and he explained what to me at least was the revolutionary concept of “Pay as you feel”. That encourages people to think about what the plate of food means to them. If they cannot afford to pay money, that is fine. If they want, they can wash up, weigh some of the intercepted food or spread the word about the concept and the project. Everyone is made to feel welcome, irrespective of ability to pay. The project works with a range of partners, including supermarkets, food banks, independent retailers, restaurants, manufacturers and wholesalers. The previous Friday, the café had fed an incredible 330 people in three hours, all with intercepted food.

The dedication and talent of the volunteers who run the Real Junk Food Project and turn what would otherwise be waste into amazing food is immense. They have transformed 250 kg of frozen turkey, in blocks requiring a forklift truck to move them, into healthy meals—with some assistance from Brighton residents willing to offer emergency freezer space. They have dealt with 630 kg of chocolate, on three industrial pallets, turning up outside someone’s window. That might sound like a dream come true, but it is nevertheless a serious logistical challenge. This is a hugely impressive operation already, and the people involved have big ambitions for the future, including a shipping container café; putting to good use underused community centres; building a model of a main hub plus offshoots run by the local community; and, further ahead, expanding into deliveries to older people and others in need.

Another local project that I want to mention—sadly, there is not enough time to mention them all—is FareShare Brighton and Hove, set up 15 years ago to provide food to the 11 services in the city serving hot food to homeless people and last year expanding to FareShare Sussex. Now, it is an essential community food service with twice daily deliveries to more than 60 projects across Sussex, totalling more than 7 tonnes each week.

The first crucial point illustrated by those initiatives is that the current level of waste in our food system is scandalous. I am talking not just about waste from supermarkets but, as I mentioned in my first intervention, waste all the way up the supply chain. That a supermarket can apparently reject 30 tonnes of cauliflowers because they are the wrong shade of white tells us something about the fundamental changes that we need. An estimated 18 million tonnes of food is wasted in Britain annually, from farm to fork.

The second point is that food is a basic right and should be available to everyone, regardless of financial status. Unfortunately, that is not the society that we live in today. We heard earlier this month that there has been an alarming increase in food poverty and food bank use in the UK, with proposed benefit cuts threatening to plunge 40,000 more children below the poverty line. That shows that food bank visits, which topped 1 million this year, are just the tip of an iceberg of food poverty in the UK.

The public demand for the Government to act on food waste and food poverty is also clear, not least from the superbly successful supermarket food waste petition started by my constituent, Lizzie Swarf. As I said, that petition calls for legislation to require supermarkets to donate leftover food that is still safe to eat to charities and food banks, based on the new law on supermarket food redistribution passed by the French Parliament last month.

In just a couple of weeks, that petition has gained more than 175,000 signatures. I recognise that a number of logistical and other challenges would need to be worked out before such a law could be implemented, but that is not an excuse for inaction. I hope that the Minister will at least agree to go away and examine the options and work with expert organisations, such as the Trussell Trust and FareShare, on the best way forward. I hope that he will agree that a review should urgently examine ways to support food redistribution further up the supply chain and to tackle the root causes of food bank use, including benefit changes and delays and low incomes.

As FareShare has explained, the UK Government can and should play a significant role in ensuring that food redistribution is seen as an important piece of the puzzle to reduce food waste overall, ensuring that it is easier for charities to intercept food elsewhere in the supply chain. As the hon. Member for Bristol East mentioned, France, partly with Government funding, already redistributes 20 times more surplus food than the UK. Perhaps the Minister will today commit to doing what it takes to match that achievement as a first step. I hope that he will be able to tell us what his ministerial colleagues in other Departments—Health, Business and the Cabinet Office—are doing and whether they are open to playing their part in relation to food poverty, food waste and the charities that are making such a positive difference to so many of our constituents. A little Government funding for such projects would go an incredibly long way, and I hope that the Minister will have some specific advice to offer on that matter.

I shall end by highlighting a final piece of inspiration from Brighton’s Real Junk Food Project. It aims to use the catastrophic problem of food waste not just as a solution to hunger, but as a way of raising awareness—to teach people how to be waste conscious, how to live sustainably, how to compost, how to grow their own food and how to eat healthily. There is a huge role for education and culture change when it comes to our broken food system, and many organisations are already doing incredible things that bring to life positive, sustainable and healthy alternatives.

I hope that, as politicians, we can learn lessons in the course of this Parliament from the excellent work going on all over the country and ensure that we do our bit to fix the food system, too. I look forward to working with the hon. Member for Bristol East and others on this issue.

My final words to the Minister are these. There are not many win-wins in politics, so when we are staring one in the face, as I believe we are on this issue, it is incumbent on the Government—and, indeed, all of us—to do everything we can to grasp that win-win. I genuinely believe that it is there for the grasping and I hope very much that the Minister will respond positively.

--- Later in debate ---

[Rory Stewart]

I thank the hon. Lady; I stand corrected. I was getting my Belgian and French petitions confused. But the conceptual point I wanted to make is that this process, whether in France or in Belgium, is about driving civil society actions, through petitions, alongside Government action.

[Caroline Lucas]

I thank the Minister for his response, and for the detail that he is going into. Will he clarify what he thinks the obstacles would be to a piece of legislation that looked something like the Bill that the hon. Member for Bristol East brought before the House, or like the French model? Are they technical obstacles, which we can clarify, or are they ideological obstacles to do with regulation? It would be really helpful to know.

[Rory Stewart]

I am a little bit reluctant to get drawn into the detail of all this at the moment, but a series of questions would have to be answered before we could go ahead with that legislation. Take the good samaritan legislation in the United States. Given that it has not been challenged so far; given that most retailers in the UK do not seem to be indicating that the major obstacle to taking action or improving performance is a concern about being sued over food safety issues; and given that the Food Standards Agency would have to continue to exercise its legislative powers anyway, and that if someone unfortunately got food poisoning from food that had been disposed of, it would remain a responsibility of the Government—and, unfortunately, indirectly, of the retailer, probably—it is not clear to me at the moment that a good samaritan Act is necessarily the way to go.

I am being shifty about the next set of issues, because they relate to the Treasury and to fiscal instruments, which are for the Treasury to consider, and I do not wish to get whacked for speculating on them.

That brings me back to civil society and central Government. The key to all this— we have made more progress than anyone else in Europe in this respect—is the impressive role played by NGOs, such as the Real Junk Food Project, mentioned by the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion; WRAP, which the hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge mentioned; FareShare; and Feedback. The hon. Member for Bristol East mentioned Tristram Stuart, who is an extraordinary phenomenon. He has succeeded in combining his own personal lifestyle as a freegan with leading the collection of waste food and writing a best-selling book, and with his understanding of the intricacies of both national and European Union legislation and his attachment to technology. That is a really good example of where Britain is doing well.

The consequences of the work done by NGOs can be seen. We should also pay tribute to the previous Government for their funding to get WRAP off the ground. That is another good example of how things can be driven forward, and of the way that legislation, UK performance and global indicators can be shaped by such civil society debates. The app piloted by Tesco is the latest great example of people coming up with creative technological solutions that can go straight into a retailer. In addition—this is the point at which I sound like a crusty old Tory—this stuff is also good for the UK economy, because a lot of people are now exporting these ideas as consultants, taking British thought-leadership to other countries and showing how our approach to food waste can be replicated in other places. Of the extraordinary and impressive 21% reduction in household food waste that we have achieved, probably 40% has been achieved through the kind of awareness campaigns and civil society campaigns that have been mentioned. We do not want to minimise that in any way.

A decade of work to tackle food waste has given us much more knowledge of why and where food waste happens. We have tried and tested approaches that have delivered significant reductions. We now need to go further. Waste must be tackled across the whole value chain, and not just in the UK. We may need to start thinking about the value chain stretching into other countries. For example, if we are eating Kenyan food we have a moral obligation, in a sense, to the Kenyan farmers producing it, and to food waste in places where our supermarket ombudsman cannot stretch at the moment.

Food waste has a close relationship with sustainability and food security. The subject is central. Food, metaphorically and literally, is the energy of our lives. It is intimately connected to our soil, water and air, and to our habitats and our landscape. Again, speaking as a crusty Tory, it is also important to our economy. Millions of people work in this sector.