Food Poverty

Lord Bishop of St Albans Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2014 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the recommendations of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Food Poverty’s recent report, Feeding Britain.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, this report is a serious contribution to an important and wide-ranging debate, which recognises the multiple factors behind demand for emergency food assistance. As a country, we have enough food to go round. We agree that it is wrong that anyone should go hungry at the same time as surplus food is going to waste. There is a moral argument, as well as a sustainability one, to ensure that we make the best use of our resources.

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans]

I thank the Minister for his reply. I pay tribute to my colleague, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Truro, for co-chairing the inquiry. When the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury launched the report, he said that a party -political approach will not solve a problem such as this because of its complexity. I wonder whether the Minister would agree with that sentiment and whether, therefore, a genuine cross-party approach can be adopted to implementing the recommendations of the report. In particular, will the Government liaise and work closely with voluntary agencies, with the food banks and with industry to address the pressing problem of food waste and redistribution, whereby millions of tonnes of perfectly good food are going to waste at great cost, at a time when hundreds of thousands of people are still hungry?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the Government are very happy to do that. After all, the whole food bank movement is a major civil society initiative. I entirely agree with the right reverend Prelate that this is a long-term problem and that we should not approach it in a partisan manner. Perhaps I might quote from the report:

“How a society protects the poorest from what appears to be a fundamental change in the way economies of the Western world are operating – which results in cuts in their living standards”—

that is, those of the poor—

“faster than other groups – calls for developing a political agenda which can only be delivered over decades”.