Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what discussions his Department has had with the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government and the Department for Work and Pensions, on the effect on the food redistribution sector of his Department's decision to award £16 million of emergency funding in May 2020 and an additional £16 million Winter Support Grant in December 2020 to food redistribution charities; and what steps his Department is taking to monitor the effectiveness of that funding.

From the May 2020 funding of £16 million, £1.8 million is supporting over 100 not-for-profit organisations to carry out key redistribution activities such as storage and repackaging and redistributing to charities and/or end beneficiaries through the Covid-19 emergency food surplus redistribution programme. This programme is administered on behalf of Defra by the Waste and Resource Action Programme (WRAP) and is focused on preventing surplus food from becoming waste.

In addition, the Government has put in place a winter package to support the economically vulnerable. This package includes a £170 million Covid Winter Support Grant distributed by the Department for Work and Pensions to local authorities to support households with food and other costs, and £16 million of funding for Defra to support charities with food distribution to the vulnerable, which is being managed by the food redistributor FareShare.

After eight weeks of the £16 million grant scheme, the equivalent of 6.8 million meals have been distributed to 3,449 organisations across England. FareShare and Defra staff meet weekly for performance reviews, where FareShare presents delivery statistics against key performance indicators set at the start of the scheme.

Frequent discussions are ongoing at ministerial and official level to support this and wider work linked to this scheme.