National Food Strategy and Food Security

Mark Spencer Excerpts

Thursday 27th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mark Spencer)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Tatton (Esther McVey) and the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) on securing this important debate, and I thank the Backbench Business Committee for allowing the time for it.

We are fortunate in the United Kingdom to have a highly resilient food supply chain that is built on strong domestic production and imports via sustainable trade routes, but it is worth acknowledging that food security has become a very hot topic politically. When I was elected in 2010, I highlighted food security as a very important topic in my maiden speech. It is not new to me; it is something I have been worrying about and concentrating on for most of my political career.

But we can meet these challenges. Domestic production figures have been very stable for most of this century. We produce 61% of all the food we need and 74% of that which we can grow in the UK. Those figures have changed little over the past 20 years. When food products cannot be produced here, or at least not on a year-round basis, British consumers have access to them through international trade. That supplements domestic production and ensures that any disruption from risks such as adverse weather or disease does not affect the overall security of the UK’s supply chain. I acknowledge that, as many Members have said, educating our consumers on what is seasonal and what is grown in the UK is a very healthy thing to do.

Across the UK, 465,000 people are employed in food and non-alcoholic drink manufacturing. We are proud to have a collaborative relationship with the industry, which allows us to respond to disruption effectively, as demonstrated in the response to the unprecedented disruption to supply chains during the covid-19 pandemic. DEFRA monitors food supply and will continue to do so over the autumn and winter period. We work closely with the industry to keep abreast of supply and price trends, which will be particularly important in the run-up to Christmas.

We recognise that rising food prices are a big challenge for household budgets. The latest figures for year-on-year food and drink prices show an annual rate of inflation of 14.6% in the year to September 2022, up from 13.1% in August 2022. While we remain confident in sectors being able to continue to deliver products to consumers, my Department continues to work to identify further options that will help businesses to reduce costs and pass on those savings to consumers.

The Government have committed £37 billion of support to households with the cost of living. That includes an additional £500 million to help with the cost of household essentials, bringing total funding for that support to £1.5 billion. In England, this is in the form of an extension to the household support fund, running from 1 October 2022 to 31 March 2023.

We must be prepared for the future. That is why we published the Government’s food strategy in June, setting out our plan to transform our food system, and I have a copy of it here. The hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) said we had not given any thought to that; I hope he has had an opportunity to read the Government’s food strategy, to which the hon. Member for Bristol East referred. The strategy puts food security right at the heart of the Government’s vision for the food sector. It sets out our ambition to boost food production in key sectors and to create jobs, with a focus on skills and innovations, ensuring that those are spread across the whole country. Our aim is to broadly maintain the current level of food we produce domestically and boost production in sectors where there are the biggest opportunities. Setting this commitment demonstrates that we recognise the critical importance of domestic food production and the role it plays in our food security.

As the Prime Minister said only this week, at the heart of this Government’s mandate is our manifesto, which includes our commitment to protect the environment. The Government are introducing three environmental land management schemes that reward environmental benefits: the sustainable farming incentive, local nature recovery and landscape recovery.

Our farming reforms are designed to support farmers to produce food sustainably and productively, and to deliver the environmental improvements from which we will all benefit. I assure the House that boosting food production and strengthening resilience go hand in hand with sustainability—we can do all those things. We can make sure that we increase biodiversity, we can improve the environment and we can continue to keep ourselves well fed in the UK.

Although our food supply chains remain strong, some specific commodities have been affected by the invasion of Ukraine, especially sunflower oil. The Government are supporting industry to manage those challenges. For example, DEFRA worked closely with the Food Standards Agency to adopt a pragmatic approach to the enforcement of labelling rules, so that certain alternative oils could be used in place of sunflower oil without requiring changes to the labels. DEFRA will continue to engage with the seafood sector, including the fish and chip shop industry, to monitor the impacts and to encourage the adoption of alternative sources of supply, which will be of great importance to the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael).

The food strategy announced our intention to publish the land use framework, to which several hon. Members referred. We will set out our land use change principles to ensure that food security is balanced alongside climate, environment and infrastructure outcomes. We are seeking to deliver as much as we can with our limited supply of land to meet the full range of Government commitments through multifunctional landscapes.

We also need to recognise that the production of food and the support of our farmers have an impact on those landscapes. It is no coincidence that the beautiful stone walls in North Yorkshire, which tourists enjoy going to see, are there to keep sheep in. If we remove the sheep—

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

And the Cotswolds.

[Mark Spencer]

And the Cotswolds, I hear an interested hon. Member say from a sedentary position. Similarly, it is worth recognising that the beautiful rolling moors of Exmoor and Dartmoor look as they do only because of the food that is produced and the sheep that graze on them.

The food strategy also sets out the significant investments that are already being made across the food system, including more than £120 million of joint funding with UK Research and Innovation in food systems research and innovation; £100 million in the seafood fund; £270 million across the farming innovation programme; and £11 million to support new research to drive improvements in understanding the relationship between food and health. That is vital; agritech and investment in new technologies will help us on the way.

We are taking steps to accelerate innovation by creating a new, simpler regulatory regime to allow researchers and breeders to unlock the benefits of technologies. My right hon. Friend the Member for Tatton talked about her constituent who is producing an awfully large number of tomatoes—I forget how many.

[Esther McVey]

Some 650 million.

[Mark Spencer]

That could produce quite a lot of ketchup. New technologies in harvesting and production will assist those industries as we move forward. I hope that hon. Members on both sides of the House will be here to support the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill as it passes through the House on Monday.

In the eight minutes that I have been allowed, it has not been possible to answer all the questions of Back Benchers. I think there were 11 speakers, which would have given me 40 seconds to respond to each contribution. If there are comments or questions that I have missed, however, I would be more than happy to write to hon. Members; I understand that this is a topic of great interest to hon. Members on both sides of the House.

Food has rarely been as high on the Government’s agenda. It is a critical issue and the Government are prioritising it accordingly. We have already seen the high resilience of our food supply chains, but my Department will continue to work closely with the industry to address any evolving issues. We will prepare for the future by investing in research and innovation. Our farming reforms will help to support farmers to maintain higher levels of food production, and we will protect the environment at the same time.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

The Minister’s speech prompts me to heap praise on the great farmers of the Ribble Valley. We have a lot of stone walls there too.