Food, Poverty, Health and the Environment Committee Report

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Thursday 10th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Gardner of Parkes (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Sentamu, on his maiden speech.

There is so much to support in this report, and I hope that together the Government, the National Health Service, schools and charities can act together on the recommendations to help ensure that healthy food is available to everyone and that food waste is eradicated. It is also interconnected with food production, with too much focus on unhealthy processed food and food wastage worth £200 billion a year. Even teaching adults and children how to cook a healthy meal and how to reuse left-over food is part of this equation.

It will come as no surprise that food poverty has been at its peak during the coronavirus pandemic, with more people from all walks of life accessing food banks. The work done by the likes of the Felix project, which delivered 29.1 million meals to Londoners in a year since the first UK lockdown, has been so important. A founder of the Felix project, Justin Byam Shaw, said:

“The Covid epidemic has created a dramatic hunger crisis in the UK, not seen perhaps since the 1930s ... In 2020, The Felix Project delivered 8,600 tonnes of good food to 980 local charities and schools—completely for free. As a result, 260,000 Londoners were given food every week and 43,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases were stopped from polluting the planet in the form of wasted food.”


More than 2,000 volunteers gave their time and more than 500 businesses donated their surplus food, ranging from farms to supermarkets and others.

The work of the Felix project is just one of many great examples of charitable work, but it also highlights a fundamental flaw in how much food is being discarded. We need to look at how we can stem this flow and get people and retailers to better manage their food and supplies. It has been found that where councils introduce food waste collections, people have been shocked to see what they throw away and either buy less or use their food more wisely. WRAP does much work in the area, particularly with businesses and manufacturers. We need to work together to make a real difference.

I have spoken before of the need to retain the £20 universal credit payment introduced during the Covid lockdowns. This remains critical to many families to help them feed their children. Research has shown how important proper meals are to school children, helping them to concentrate in lessons. Whether this is free via school meals or through their parents, it is vital that we ensure that children receive proper meals—through their school holidays, too. I ask the Government to look at how this can be achieved.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

I am unable to call the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, so I call the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Gardner of Parkes, my fellow Australian-born female Peer in your Lordships’ House. That will become somewhat relevant later. I also welcome the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Sentamu, back to your Lordships’ House. The last time we met, I believe we were talking about Yorkshire devolution, so I look forward to having future conversations on such matters.

I join pretty well all noble Lords in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, and his committee on a spectacularly weighty report that really deserves the paper it is printed on. That is not something that can always be said. I join him, the noble Baronesses, Lady Parminter and Lady Lister, and many others in expressing strong disappointment at the Government’s response to the report. “Thin” is, I think, the adjective that has been used. I would probably go further and say “derisory”. However, I take one piece of consolation from reading the Government response. It seems to have evaded that incredibly powerful directive being delivered to all Government output. It does not seem to contain the phrase “world-leading”. That is quite telling, because it reflects the fact that even this Government cannot apply the phrase “world-leading” to the UK’s food system—the broken food system that this report so clearly identifies.

We find ourselves in a very curious constitutional position. The Government’s response says that we all have to wait for Mr Dimbleby’s report. I am not quite sure what place Mr Dimbleby has in the British constitution, but it seems to be a very important one, according to that.

However, I hold great hopes for Mr Dimbleby’s work, and I very much look forward to it, but I have a small disagreement with the words from Henry Dimbleby quoted in this report, in which he says of the food system,

“it is almost impossible to act on it … without creating winners and losers.”

The word I question in that sentence is “creating”. What we have is a food system that now has some truly spectacular winners: the supermarkets, the multinational food manufacturers, the fast-food companies, the seed and agrochemical companies. It also has some truly spectacular losers, as many noble Lords have outlined, starting with the children of the UK who are losing out with a dreadful quality of diet. Our public health is losing out very spectacularly—and, of course, our environment. It has often been said that Mr Dimbleby is producing England’s first ever food strategy. I would say that this is not the first food strategy, it is the first written-down food strategy. Our strategy for decades has been to allow multinational companies and supermarkets decide what we eat, and we can see the results in this report.

However, I want always to look forward and be positive. I want to pick out some words from the report by the National Farmers Union. Philip Hambling talks about the traditional “three-legged stool” of sustainability, in that it has economic, environmental and social legs. It is already clear from what many other noble Lords have said that the social leg has not so much been broken off as smashed to smithereens, given the level of food poverty in the UK. In fact, I would say that this is not food poverty; it is simply poverty. This has been covered very well by other noble Lords. The noble Lord, Lord Krebs, compared the situation 100 or so years ago with the disastrous situation we are in now, saying that somehow, we have been through a cycle and ended up in a similar position. I will draw a further parallel. Back then, our food system was starving many millions of people in India, in the Empire. Today, there is more than enough food for everyone to be fed, but nearly 1 billion people regularly go to bed hungry.

I turn to an issue that no one else has yet referred to today. We need to acknowledge—particularly the Minister who is now speaking for the Government—that this should all be seen in the context of COP 26 and our chairing of it. Repairing our food system is surely part of our responsibility in that role.

That brings me back to Australian issues. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, the noble Earl, Lord Devon, and the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, all referred to the potential for an Australian free trade deal. I refer to paragraph 469 of the report, which states:

“Food imports must be required to adhere to the same environmental and health welfare standards that are in the UK.”


Most other noble Lords have rightly expressed concern about the impact on British farmers of food imports from Australia, particularly meat imports, but I raise the question of the environmental impact of producing those food imports, along with the animal welfare impact. A week or so ago I wrote a piece for the Yorkshire Post reflecting on the fact that not only are my origins Australian, but my first degree was in agricultural science. I worked on Australian farms, and I told some tales from those farms and their animal welfare standards then. I should warn noble Lords not to read them over breakfast. However, I can also tell noble Lords that I was significantly pulling my punches, because there are some things that you simply cannot write in a national or regional newspaper.

Are the Government considering the environmental and animal welfare impacts in terms not only of competition but the state of the world? Is it appropriate to take food from a production system based on the ecocide and genocide of white settler capitalism in Australia that continues to be utterly destructive and profoundly damaging to the environment?

I want to put a couple of more questions to the Minister, given the department he represents, and given that the UK will be chairing COP 26. A former Secretary of State of that department, Michael Gove, was keen on agroecology and agroforestry. Although the report does not use the term “agroecology”, it does refer to farming systems that would fit the agroecological model. As the new Minister, does the noble Lord intend to push agroecological approaches, particularly given the emphasis the report places on the importance of research and development? Is he keen to see far more research and development in the agroecological area?

I stress that I want to be positive, so I thought I would take that three-legged stool idea and construct a new one that the Government might find attractive and be prepared to adopt. I will reframe the report in my final two minutes. I shall refer to “three Ps” that I hope the Government will at least in theory agree to adopting. The first “P” stands for productivity. I hear often from the Benches opposite the desire to improve the productivity of the UK. Can the Minister say whether there has been any consideration of, or reports on, the impact of our poor diet on the UK’s productivity? We hear a lot about the impact on health, and we know that obesity, heart disease, diabetes and all such diseases pose a significant problem for public health. I would posit that they also have a significant impact on the productivity of this country. The Government might like to think about that.

The second “P” is prosperity. The noble Earl, Lord Devon, talked about the South-West Food Hub and how exciting efforts are being made in local food production, bringing huge opportunities to small independent businesses and local traders in order to spread prosperity around the country. That fits very much with the Government’s levelling-up agenda.

The final “P”—I admit I am stretching the “Ps” a little here—is polarity. The levelling-up agenda talks about dealing with regional inequalities in the UK. We have poles of wealth and poles of poverty. If we have strong food systems in every region of the UK—small independent businesses, local greengrocers, markets and cafes all being supplied with local food—what you will have is economic circulation.

These are my suggestions for the three-legged stool, framed in a form that the Government might like. Much of this report could be implemented in that direction, so I hope that the Government will reconsider their response.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

I cannot call the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, so I will call the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market.