Food Waste

Earl of Shrewsbury Excerpts

Thursday 4th February 2016 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Shrewsbury (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, on securing her Question today. I should declare an interest as a former farmer and producer of food. Although a relative newcomer to this subject, I nevertheless have considerable concerns regarding food wastage in general. I was fascinated by the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Young, regarding his cocker spaniel. I have a black Labrador. She does not even allow us to get to the food before she has it before Sunday lunch.

I shall be very brief in what I have to say. Food waste is not a problem peculiar to this country. It is a worldwide phenomenon which has a vast financial and environmental cost, but the United Kingdom has a particularly wasteful record amounting to some £700 a year for every household, yet there has been a reduction in household food waste since 2007 of some 15% despite a significant increase in the number of households. This reduction has been achieved by the excellent initiatives being carried out through the Courtauld commitment and WRAP’s Love Food Hate Waste campaign. I congratulate them both.

Yet we continue to waste unacceptable quantities of food on a daily basis. To illustrate this, in the run up to Christmas, a very large provider of oven-ready poultry in the Midlands was marketing at greatly discounted prices carcases nearing their sell-by date which had been returned from supermarkets. With three days to go until Christmas Eve, I asked a member of its staff what would happen to a bird should it not be sold in time. The answer was that it would go to landfill. What a terrible waste. That is nothing short of appalling. In days gone by, the pig industry was an avid guzzler of swill, which took up considerable amounts of food waste. However, that practice was rife with some pretty dodgy activities and it was subsequently, quite rightly, limited following the foot and mouth crisis which did the agricultural industry so much damage. Why could this food not be frozen and brought out later for consumption in, say, hospitals, prepared meals and a large range of other uses for human and even pet consumption? What a waste. It is totally unnecessary to discard it.

What is being done to minimise the sending of such food to landfill? Surely the cost of sending such materials to landfill is significant in landfill tax when some sort of return could be achieved from recycling that material. Anaerobic digestion technology has revolutionised the disposal of waste food in the UK and beyond, but it is extremely expensive to develop at entry point. The start-up cost is millions of pounds. One has to ask the question whether, with the proposed reductions in feed-in tariffs, that makes the development of new AD systems and technology less economically viable, which is likely to reduce the attraction of using waste food as feed stock.

Finally, the practice of discarding considerable amounts of the catch by our fishing industry is immoral. It deprives our seas of breeding stock and the consumer of a product which could be used in a wide variety of foods. Is the Minister able to provide an update on the current situation regarding discards? While things might be seem to be heading in the right direction, with a great deal of effort from many people and bodies, in many influential areas there is still a very long way to go in our attitude to and handling of waste food.