What Works Network: Centre for Food

Victoria Prentis Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd March 2022 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for Farming, Fisheries and Food (Victoria Prentis)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Miller. I congratulate the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Alex Norris) on securing the debate. I very much hope that it will be part of a wide series of debates about quite specific but important issues around the publication of the Government’s White Paper in response to Henry Dimbleby’s food strategy. The good work that the Government will do in response to his work will be in the details. Yes, there will be headlines, but I suspect that most of the nudge behaviours that change the way in which we as a nation eat, and that help us to eat more healthy and sustainable diets, will come in the kind of work that we are discussing this morning and in careful, thoughtful policy making of the sort that the hon. Gentleman has set out.

It is a great delight to welcome my hon. Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Ruth Edwards), whose constituency I had the great pleasure of visiting recently, when we were able to taste some delicious cheese. I would be delighted to come again, as long as the quality of the lunch is as good as it was last time.

The hon. Member for Nottingham North is clearly passionate about the need for a What Works centre for food. I am convinced that What Works centres can add real value in increasing the supply and demand for evidence, tailoring outputs to the needs of the respective decision makers and helping Departments and stakeholders access and interpret evidence to inform policy questions, as well as longer-term strategic priorities. Really good examples, as the hon. Member said, include NICE and the Education Endowment Foundation. I share the hon. Member’s passion for making good policy and working out how things work best. I am sure that What Works centres have a place in that, and I too am pleased that the Government are willing to use them. However, I cannot promise that they are the answer to every question.

Let me set out the current Government thinking on this issue. For the past 18 months, we have been working across Government to develop the food strategy White Paper. We have been considering the recommendations of Henry Dimbleby’s independent review into food, setting out the Government’s ambition and priorities for the food system and, we hope, taking a truly one-Government approach to the food system. Some 16 Departments have an interest in food—as do we all, frankly. It is important that we consider food strategy in the longer term in a joined-up way. We will be publishing our strategy in the coming weeks after putting the finishing touches to it.

Our strategy will build on existing work across Government and identify new opportunities to make the food system healthier, more sustainable and, given the enormous challenges we have had to cope with over the last couple of years, as resilient as possible. Issues around governance and data in the food system will be a critical, though possibly not the most headline-grabbing, part of the food strategy White Paper. We want to examine how, in this fragmented landscape, we can ensure that evidence is generated and shared and then becomes part of a greater whole. The gap is often not so much in the generation of evidence—particularly in the food space—but in its effective translation into policy.

In his independent review, Henry Dimbleby recommended that two What Works centres be set up—one focusing on agricultural production and one on diet shift. Turning to the What Works centre on diet shift, we are fortunate enough to benefit from the huge wealth of evidence on healthy and sustainable diets that is already available to us, even if we do not all follow it every day. The key challenge is how we translate and make better use of that existing evidence to encourage a healthier and more sustainable diet shift.

The newly established Office for Health Improvement and Disparities will bring together expert evidence and analysis with policy development and implementation to shape and drive health improvement and equalities priorities for Government. Piloting real-world interventions is the way forward in this space. Professor David Salt is already doing valuable work on the ways in which we can all change our behaviour going forward. The hon. Member for Nottingham North was right to reference the great work being done by academics and universities across the nation in this space, but our priority is to make sure that we use this work properly.

Piloting and interventions are the way to go. In these circumstances, we think What Works is not the answer to this particular issue, but we are keeping the matter under review. I am sure we will be discussing it with the Food Standards Agency and others in the coming weeks when we concentrate on the food strategy.

As for the recommendation for a What Works centre on ag production, the AHDB delivered a pilot known as the evidence for farming initiative in 2020-21. The aim of the pilot was to develop a prototype of the What Works centre for ag and horticulture that would demonstrate how evidence could be brought together to inform best practice uptake in farming. The work is now informing AHDB’s new proposal for a What Works centre in this space, and officials in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs are in close collaboration on that work and are actively considering it.

On production, of course we recognise the importance of supporting farmers to access and adopt best practice. Farmers often work alone, and innovation sometimes needs encouragement from the Government and experts in academia and elsewhere. Indeed, as in industry, as the hon. Gentleman referenced, we are targeting our new work at encouraging real progress. Much of the data work that I talked about earlier will be done hand in hand with industry. The issues are difficult. We are talking about diet shift and accurate and transparent labelling. The Government cannot do this in a top-down way. It has to be done in lockstep with industry at every stage of the food supply chain. We will spend over £270 million across our farming innovation programme to stimulate research and development in agricultural innovation. We are looking at that programme closely and exploring what the barriers are to innovation and how best to address them.

I look forward to updating the House on our plans as they develop, and we in DEFRA will continue to champion the best farming practices and to promote healthier, more sustainable diets. I thank the hon. Gentleman for this discussion. As we publish our food strategy White Paper in the coming weeks, I encourage Members from across the House to engage with DEFRA to help us identify new opportunities for best practice and joined-up working for our food system going forward.

Question put and agreed to.