Food and Farming: Supply Issues

Lord McLoughlin Excerpts

Thursday 20th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

My Lords, we are. We want to encourage local food chains to operate more effectively; it is of course much healthier for the environment and the quality of the food is better. We want to disrupt highly centralised food chains where we can. We also want to make sure that we are encouraging as stable a food chain system as we can, because we rely on the just-in-time measures to get food from the field to the plate.

[Lord McLoughlin (Con)]

My Lords, we are seeing a rise in the number of farm shops up and down the country, but what is the department doing to ensure that large supermarkets sell British products?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The best pressure on supermarkets does not necessarily come from finger-wagging of the Government or measures from Ministers but from the customer. We must encourage people to shop locally; for example, if they are concerned about the effects of their diet on climate change, eating grass-fed, locally produced meat means they are probably doing more to help the environment than when buying products that have been brought from the other side of the world, under circumstances that are much below our standards in this country.