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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment her Department has made of the feasibility of bringing forward legislative proposals to reduce the practice by large food retailers of destroying or disposing of unsold food.

The Government favours a voluntary approach to the prevention of food waste, including the redistribution of surplus food to feed people. A law focused on the redistribution of surplus food from supermarkets would not resolve the barriers to redistribution. Research published by the Waste and Resources Action Programme in May 2016 indicates that supermarkets only produce around 200,000 tonnes of the 10 million tonnes of food waste which arise each year in the UK. Our approach is to work with the whole supply chain through the voluntary Courtauld 2025 agreement.