National Food Strategy

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Thursday 24th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I will write to the noble Baroness with details of that. The food strategy is a comprehensive piece of work which looks at a lot of health-related matters. It is across government, and the Department of Health has been very closely involved in putting it together. I cannot tell her exactly whether there will be reference to food allergies in it, but there is certainly a lot of work going on in government on that subject.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, last week’s “Countryfile”, which has great influence, was very disturbing. It indicated that we were not giving proper encouragement to our own sugar beet industry but bringing in cane sugar from thousands of miles away. This supports what was said by the splendid noble Baroness, Lady Jones. Is this the case? If it is, we have got it wrong.

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

It is the Government’s intention to sustain a viable sugar beet industry. That involves not just farmers producing sugar beet but the four factories that we have in this country continuing to do so. If one or more of them were to close, we would be reliant on sugar produced in less environmentally sustainable ways from much further away, and my noble friend is entirely right to point out that it would be at a much higher environmental cost as well.