Tag: Speeches

Cherilyn Mackrory – 2022 Speech on Floating Offshore Wind Projects

The speech made by Cherilyn Mackory, the Conservative MP for Truro and Falmouth, in the House of Commons on 18 October 2022.

I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Stephen Crabb) for securing this important debate, which places a spotlight on an exciting emerging sector for my constituency of Truro and Falmouth in Cornwall and the south-west as a whole. Cornwall is already at the heart of the green revolution. We are mining and drawing out lithium and are drilling for deep geothermal, which is why I have worked on the all-party parliamentary group for the Celtic sea to promote floating offshore wind projects off our Cornish shores.

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby), who set up the all-party group. She works tirelessly on this issue and is brilliant at bringing all the different threads together. When we became MPs in 2019, I was lobbied by only one company. Not a year later we had a reception on the Terrace where there were between 50 and 100 companies present, and that number continues to grow. It is a growing sector and one that should benefit all parts of the United Kingdom.

I was delighted to welcome the Defence Secretary, the COP26 President and the Business Secretary to Falmouth to see first hand how Cornwall can help deliver this vision. It is right that the Government have a target to raise the UK’s floating offshore wind capacity from one gigawatt to five by 2030. Floating offshore wind in the Celtic sea will be crucial to reaching that target, with the Crown Estate recently announcing that the leasing round for the region will be launched in mid-2023. That could deliver 4 GW of installed UK floating offshore wind capacity by 2035, supporting up to 3,200 jobs, with the potential of £682 million spend in the local supply chain by 2030.

A key part of the strategy is the TwinHub project, which is the first floating offshore wind project in the Celtic sea, based off the Cornish north coast. TwinHub has developed a new design that places two turbines on one platform, which gets twice the bang for its buck. This offshore wind farm will produce more energy while taking up comparatively less space and, by 2025, will be generating enough electricity to power 45,000 homes. The wider opportunities that floating offshore wind and the Celtic sea present will create over 1,500 skilled jobs, with £900 million headed for the regional economy by 2030 based on current projections.

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire alluded to, the grid support maintenance will require cohesive collaboration between the public and private sectors, but we need the big port upgrades to build these floating offshore wind farms. Falmouth is one of the deepest ports in the world and is ideally positioned to become an integration port where turbines will be put together before being towed out to sea. Falmouth is also best placed for the maintenance of components and used vessels. The south-west supply chains will then be built up and will develop a strong network of experienced project developers and a wealth of skills and experience. These are all high-quality careers for the future of Cornish children in my schools. Falmouth should therefore receive its first share of the £160 million floating offshore wind manufacturing investment scheme to unlock wider private sector investment in the Celtic sea.

North sea ports already have the necessary infrastructure to be competitive due to their historical industry. If Celtic sea ports such as Falmouth are not upgraded, we risk utilising just one sea rather than the two. I urge the Government to look at further streamlining planning regulations to speed up the upgrades. One thing that the Celtic sea APPG has done perfectly is to encourage a port strategy. If I have one plea for the Minister, it is to try to do that, so that we know which ports will be best placed to do which parts and we can turbocharge development to ensure we get it right. Incidentally, Cornwall Council has submitted its application for an investment zone, which will include Falmouth port. I pay tribute to the council and our portfolio holder for economic growth, Louis Gardner, who has turbocharged efforts since coming into post recently to ensure we get this right for Cornwall.

Cornwall has a rich and proud maritime industrial history. I believe the Government can build on that by supporting investment in the port of Falmouth and the development of TwinHub, as well as ensuring high-skilled, well-paid careers for Cornish young people. If we can do that, Cornwall can continue to be at the heart of the green revolution. I urge the Government to listen to everything that is being said today.

October 30, 2022
Mark Spencer – 2022 Speech on the National Food Strategy and Food Security

The speech made by Mark Spencer, the Minister of State at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, in the House of Commons on 27 October 2022.

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.

October 30, 2022
Daniel Zeichner – 2022 Speech on the National Food Strategy and Food Security

The speech made by Daniel Zeichner, the Labour MP for Cambridge, in the House of Commons on 27 October 2022.

I, too, congratulate the right hon. Member for Tatton (Esther McVey), my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) and the Backbench Business Committee on enabling this debate. I thank all hon. Members across the House for their excellent contributions and congratulate the Minister on his reappointment. I also pay tribute to all those who produce our food—the farmers, the fishers, the people in the processing sector, the retail workers and the delivery workers who keep Britain fed.

This debate is timely, but frankly it is very late—astonishingly, the UK has not had a proper food strategy since the last days of the Labour Government. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East and others pointed out, we do at least have the widely welcomed Dimbleby report, called “The Plan”, which is significant in the absence of any plan from this Government—and not just the absence of a plan, but an abrogation of responsibility. It is the same old approach from this Government, leaving the food system to the supermarkets and saying, “Let them sort it out.” That is not good enough —not good enough at all.

The reason that is not good enough is because of what we have been hearing from hon. Members across the House. I will not repeat all the statistics, but the hon. Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) outlined some of the figures from the Office for National Statistics, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East. The appalling rise in staple prices is hitting people hard and the knock-on effect, as outlined by the Food Foundation, is that one in four households with children experienced food insecurity in September. That is a very bad place for this country to be in.

I will turn briefly to the furore around environmental land management plans for the future, which came about after the previous Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Jayawardena), instigated a review. That review gave rise to a whole train of concerns, with people speculating about just how committed the Government were to the “public money for public goods” approach. On the Labour side, we have consistently warned that complexity in those schemes would lead to low take-up. That is why we joined calls to move at pace to make them work, but it would be helpful if the Minister could give us some clarity about what the position now is. Perhaps he could today give precise details on the number of farmers who are taking up the schemes. He was reluctant to answer that question on Tuesday, although he admitted that sustainable farming incentive take-up was low, which confirmed what we had learned from the answer to a recent written question. If the money is not allocated, where will it go? I asked that question during the passage of the Agriculture Act 2020.

Moving back to the food strategy, we are two iterations of Government further on since it was produced, so perhaps the Minister can confirm where we stand on that. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies) for raising school food and obesity. The new Secretary of State has just come from the Department of Health and Social Care, but we need a strong anti-obesity strategy. Some of the mood music coming from the new Secretary of State in her previous job did not exactly convince me that she is an interventionist on such issues, so will the Minister at least tell us where the current measures in the anti-obesity strategy stand?

Will the Minister also tell us where the Government are on supply chain fairness, on Dimbleby’s very important suggestions on data, and on the future of the Groceries Code Adjudicator? At a time of such pressure on producers, the notion that in the name of deregulation the role of the GCA will be subsumed into the Competition and Markets Authority rightly caused huge alarm. Given the CMA response a couple of days ago, which was subtle but, I thought, damning of the Government’s responses, perhaps the Minister could tell us where that has got to. Where is the review of the dairy sector? Where has the review of the pork sector got to?

Let me move briefly on to food security and land use. There is an e-petition attached to the debate, and these issues have clearly been much discussed. We have been arguing for a long time now that we need a national land use framework. We note the work of the Lords Committee, and that the previous Secretary of State admitted that he did not much like plans in general, so what is the Minister’s view? Will he explain the Government’s position?

Briefly, I will raise the issue of bird flu. We raised it in the debate on Tuesday, and we know that it is very serious. I genuinely hope that the Minister will come back to the House with a statement soon. There are a range of important issues around housing orders, the supply of catchers, culling capacity, Animal and Plant Health Agency resource, and compensation. Without compensation, producers will not have the confidence to restock. Relying on imports would be pretty risky when other neighbouring countries are suffering similarly. This is really important in terms of food security. Chicken and eggs are pretty basic components of what we eat. It is a horrible disease, and it is dreadful to see what has happened to the wild bird population. It is awful for those working in the industry, and it is worthy of the Government giving it some attention on the Floor of the House.

When we look at the whole area of food policy, the conclusion that we come to is that there is a series of unconnected initiatives, whether in farming, fishing or food, and a lack of an overall plan. In particular, as Lord Deben has commented in the other place, there is no overall plan to meet the vital climate targets, which are so important given the issues we face.

The Government may not have a plan, but the Opposition do. We have a plan for the future of the country’s food strategy and security. We want to make, buy and sell more in the UK. We stand by the principles of public funds for public goods, but we see delivering food security harmoniously with the environment as a public good in itself. We will use public procurement contracts to drive the purchase of locally sourced food. We will introduce breakfast clubs to help to tackle some of the school food poverty and obesity challenges that people have referred to. With Labour, every public body will be tasked with securing more contracts with local producers, and we will legislate to require reporting on how much they are buying from domestic sources with taxpayers’ money, which we believe will help British farmers and local food producers.

Labour is committed to fixing the food system in order to meet the health and environmental challenges identified by Henry Dimbleby in his national food plan, to end the growing food bank scandal, to ensure that all families can access healthy, affordable food, and to improve our food security as a country. With Labour, Britain will buy, make and sell more here, and ensure that our schools and hospitals are stocked with more healthy food produced locally. We will change the food system to meet the health and climate challenges of our age, and we will do it by having the plan that the current Government so sorely lack.

October 30, 2022
Pete Wishart – 2022 Speech on the National Food Strategy and Food Security

The speech made by Pete Wishart, the SNP MP for Perth and North Perthshire, in the House of Commons on 27 October 2022.

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Tatton (Esther McVey) and the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) on raising this important issue. This has been a largely consensual debate. I will try not to spoil that tone, perhaps unsurprisingly, Madam Deputy Speaker —not by much, anyway.

It is almost unbelievable that here we are in 2022 discussing food security, but such is the range of issues we face that we now have to confront the fact this is becoming an increasingly pressing problem. There is no doubt that the war in Ukraine has had its effect, just as recovery from covid has forced us all to look at this agenda. Governments throughout the world are now looking at their strategies to deal with what is clearly an emerging crisis.

However, it is not just here in the developed world; we also have to look at what is happening in the developing world. The International Development Committee reminded us of that, because we have not just the war in Ukraine and the recovery from the covid pandemic, but the climate crisis. Some of the biblical scenes that we have seen, particularly from the Horn of Africa, would chill any Member of this House to the bone.

In the UK, though, we have a particular and distinct problem, and it has not been mentioned at all today, which is really surprising. It is the thing that has caused most of the issues that we have in this country—Brexit. Brexit has made sure that we in the UK have a range of issues and problems that are not shared by any other comparable country in the world. It has led to a set of circumstances, which are not seen elsewhere, that have negatively and adversely impacted this country. It is just so surprising that, in all the contributions that we have had today, Brexit is the one word that has not been mentioned.

As well as Brexit, there are the economic policies that have been implemented by this Government, which have made things so much worse. Inflation in this country is running at 10.1%, which is way above anything that we see in Europe and the rest of the developed world. We have negative GDP, when GDP everywhere else is growing. Food prices are way above the 10.1% headline inflation rate. They have jumped by 14.6%, led by the soaring cost of staples such as meat, bread, milk and eggs.

We now have a term for what is going on in households across the United Kingdom. It is called “low food security”, which is where households reduce the quality and desirability of their diets just to make ends meet. Worse than that, we also have the term “very low food security”, which is where household members are reducing their food intake because they lack money or other resources for food. I know that it gets said an awful lot in this House, but it is probably an understatement to say that this winter many households will face the uncomfortable choice of whether to eat or to heat. This, in one of the most prosperous countries in the world, should shame us all.

However, it is Brexit that remains the biggest homegrown issue that has singled out the UK for particular misery, and has hampered the UK’s food production, acquisition and security. Brexit has meant that we have had to deprioritise our domestic food production, because we now have to secure these free trade deals, supporting cheaper, imported food. We have now got to the stage where the UK’s food self-sufficiency is below 60%, compared with 80% two decades ago.

In 2020 the UK imported 46% of the food that it consumed, 28% of which came from Europe. This means that the UK imports more than it exports, particularly when it comes to fruit and vegetables. That is something that will only increase unless it is addressed. In days such as these, particularly given the experience of the Ukraine war, we should be building resilience in domestic food production, but instead we are threatening it with these unbalanced trade deals.

We need only look at the deals that were struck with Australia and New Zealand to see how the market has become vulnerable to lower standards and open to cheap imports. The NFS addresses some of these issues. What it says, which I hope the Government will take on board, is that Governments should agree only to cut tariffs on products that meet our standards here in the UK.

Cheap imports are such an issue now that a farmer in my constituency has said to the BBC today that he is giving away a crop of blueberries, which would normally be worth £3 million, to the charity sector and to food banks. He reckons that that crop, which would usually get £3 million, has lost £1 million in value. It is not economically worth it for him now to take that crop to market. Donating that crop shows incredible generosity, but how have we got to this situation? This is a farm that has been in business in a very productive area of Strathmore in my constituency for more than 100 years. It is having to give away a crop because there is no value in harvesting it.

All over the UK, farmers and food producers are concerned about the pressures of rising input costs on their businesses. The National Farmers Union says that while growers are

“doing everything they can to reduce their overheads…double or even triple digit inflation”

continues to cripple the sector.

This is agflation, and it is so bad that fruit and vegetable growers face inflation rates of up to 24%. Those rapidly rising costs could lead to a drop of 10% in production and more produce being left unharvested. I know the NFU has written to the Government to call for urgent action to help UK farmers to produce enough food to keep supermarkets stocked and prices affordable.

I like the strategy; I think it is a very good thing, and I hope the Government implement it and take its recommendations seriously. Recommendation 8 calls for a guarantee that agricultural payments will stay in place until 2029. That must now happen to create a semblance of certainty. Recommendation 11 also says that £1 billion should be invested

“in innovation to create a better food system.”

So far, the Government have not committed to that, and all we hear about is closing budgets.

Thankfully, agricultural support in Scotland is entirely devolved, and we are crafting a new agriculture Bill as we speak, consulting with the sector on the way forward. Unlike the UK’s approach to farm subsidies, the Scottish Government are maintaining a singular fund that will maintain pre-Brexit levels of support for farmers. The Scottish Government are doing everything they can within their limited powers and their budget envelope to ensure food security, and are consulting on the Bill to ensure that happens. At the heart of the Bill will be support for active farming, delivering high-quality, sustainable, affordable food while meeting climate change and biodiversity goals.

But the Scottish Government are doing so much more; I want to touch on free school meals, which the hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) raised, because we have the most generous universal free school meal entitlement of any UK nation. In Scotland, all children from primary 1 to primary 5 are entitled to free school meals during term time, as well as all children from households in receipt of universal credit, saving them an average £400 per year. That combines with the Scottish child payment, which has just been doubled to £20 a week and will be increased to £25 in November, which will also help Scottish families.

We are doing what we can to ensure that we help our constituents and the people of Scotland through this time, but we need the recommendations in this strategy—this very good piece of work—implemented as quickly as possible, and we must do more to ensure that we are food secure and doing what we can to help and serve our constituents.

October 30, 2022
Claudia Webbe – 2022 Speech on the National Food Strategy and Food Security

The speech made by Claudia Webbe, the Independent MP for Leicester East, in the House of Commons on 27 October 2022.

I thank the right hon. Member for Tatton (Esther McVey) and the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) for proposing this important debate, and the Backbench Business Committee for granting it.

The first job of Government is to keep people safe and well. No debate on food strategy and food security is worth its name if the issue of hunger within this country caused by the UK’s gross structural inequality is not addressed. In the UK, in September, 4 million children did not have enough to eat—that is one out of every four households with children. About 3 million of those children have working parents and still face hunger, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. An even higher number, one in three of our children, live in poverty and could tip into hunger at any moment. At the same time in our country, one in seven adults—about 8 million people—were forced to miss meals because they could not afford food as well as other essentials.

In my constituency, 42% of children have been living in poverty, a percentage that will only have risen as household bills rocket. The UN special rapporteur for extreme poverty visited the UK only four years ago and was shocked at what he saw then. He said that the issues of poverty, hunger and inequality were not expensive to fix, and that the Government could easily put them right if they chose to. Instead, the situation has been allowed to become much worse. Some would say that it has been knowingly accelerated. No food strategy adopted by the Government that does not address these issues is fit for purpose.

Equally, if the national food strategy does not protect the most vulnerable in society from food price increases, it may do more harm than good. There is no guarantee that the corporate giants in the food industry will not pass on tax costs to consumers. The Government must take steps to ensure that these businesses are not simply passing the cost of any future tax on sugar or salt on to consumers in order to maintain profits to pay excessive shareholder dividends and senior staff bonuses. There is no honour in making the poor pay for the rich.

The Government’s obligations under the international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights states that citizens must have access to affordable food without compromising other basic needs. But we already know that people are forced to compromise—forced to choose between eating or heating their homes. What work has been done to assess the imposition of a regulatory obligation on supermarkets, which wield incredible power, so as to protect the price of food staples to provide quality, nutritious foods to consumers on a cost recovery-only basis? I hope that the Minister can advise on the work that has been done in that regard. The Government have the power to stop allowing the UK to be a food bank nation and to stop forcing citizens to make such choices. The nation’s poverty and hunger is a political choice made here.

The hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Ian Byrne) is running a campaign for adequate nutrition to be recognised as a human right in the UK, which would force the Government to take responsibility for ensuring that everyone in this country is well fed, regardless of their financial circumstances. This is a duty that this Government have shamefully neglected—just ask any teacher how many of their pupils come to school hungry each morning and struggle to study as a result, which damages their prospects of any kind of improvement in their situation.

My constituents will want to know why the Government are allowing this situation not only to continue but to explode, and why having enough to eat and decent wages to allow people to feed their children is not a human right in this country. Tragically for such people, under this Government the disaster is only set to get worse. Ultimately, I believe that the primary recommendation of the national food strategy must be to make healthy food available to the nation on supermarket shelves, priced without profit and on a cost-recovery basis only, in order to honour the Government’s obligation to ensure that everyone has the right to food.

October 30, 2022
Jim Shannon – 2022 Speech on the National Food Strategy and Food Security

The speech made by Jim Shannon, the DUP MP for Strangford, in the House of Commons on 27 October 2022.

It is a pleasure to speak on this issue. We had a similar debate in Westminster Hall yesterday morning, and I am pleased to see the Minister in his place. He has a deep practical interest in this subject, so I believe he will give us the answers to our questions.

I thank the right hon. Member for Tatton (Esther McVey) and the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) for setting the scene, and I thank every Member who has contributed to this debate. Madam Deputy Speaker, you are right to say this has been a good-humoured debate, and there is agreement on both sides of the House about supporting the thrust of the national food strategy.

I declare an interest as a member of the Ulster Farmers Union, which is similar to the National Farmers Union over here, and as a landowner and farmer. The world has been devastated by the adverse effects of the pandemic and the ongoing war in Ukraine, and we in Northern Ireland also have the Northern Ireland protocol. The Minister will not be surprised that I bring it up, because it clearly has an impact by continuing to subjugate Northern Ireland and damaging small food producers.

The United Kingdom still imports 46% to 47% of its food. Many people seem to be pushing reforestation, but we need to retain productive agricultural land, so I seek confirmation from the Minister that good land will continue to be used for food production. I understand that we cannot produce all the food we consume, but we need to address that issue, too. The inescapable detriment to us of the Northern Ireland protocol has been left to fester. Food and drink entering Northern Ireland from Great Britain could be hit with hundreds of pages of paperwork, hours of border checks and millions of pounds of extra cost.

In my constituency, Lakeland Dairies, Willowbrook Foods, Mash Direct and Rich Sauces all produce goods that they export. Lakeland Dairies exports almost 70% of its products, across the whole world. It has four factories in Northern Ireland and five in the Republic of Ireland, so it faces a delicate and complex issue when it comes to continuing to produce; it services a large number of dairy farmers across the whole of Northern Ireland. In my constituency, there are almost 3,000 jobs in those sectors and across the whole of Northern Ireland 100,000 jobs depend on agriculture for their future. So the situation with the protocol is the very antithesis of food security and it has the potential to severely damage supply chain resilience in Northern Ireland. That highlights the need for the smooth passage of the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill to ensure that we in Northern Ireland to continue to produce.

The House cannot ignore and disregard the invaluable contributions of the Northern Ireland farming industry. About 75% of Northern Ireland’s countryside is farmed in some way and 80% of Northern Ireland’s produce is exported. The industry is vital for the Northern Ireland economy, employing more than 3.5% of the total workforce, which surpasses the UK average of 1.2%. Again, that underlines the true importance for us in Northern Ireland of the agriculture sector. The right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) is not in his place, but he referred to fishing, which is so important for us. I know that the Minister knows that, but if he gets the opportunity to come to Northern Ireland, we will show him some of the factories I mentioned and perhaps arrange a visit to Portavogie as well.

There are measures in the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill that are needed to address concerns in agri-industry, such as on veterinary certificates and on country of origin. As many Members are aware, my constituency has prolific farming, and I have already mentioned the fishing communities in Portavogie; we are seeking to increase those numbers. We face some workforce issues, which the Minister is aware of. We wish to contribute to and increase the UK’s national food security.

The right hon. Member for Tatton referred to robotics, and in farming of all types, be it cattle or tomato production, we see vast steps forward that will reduce the number of people we need to be involved. Robotics will be brought more into play. Again, I ask the Minister for more clarity on that and more help for farmers, who may have a lot of money to find. We must also combine productive farming, in order to sustain livelihoods and meet the growing demand for food, with sustainable methods.

I should also make a point to the Minister about partnerships involving universities. For example, Queen’s University Belfast has a partnership with business to produce new varieties of cereals and so on, which can give a 20% bigger yield. That is another thing that we need to look at—how what we put in the land can produce more. That will help us across the world. The title of this debate is “National Food Strategy and Food Security”, which makes it clear that this is about the national position, but we also have an obligation to look after other parts of the world.

However, we cannot reap the true benefits of the Northern Irish farming and fishing industries if the protocol continues to erect a border down the Irish sea, preventing trade between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. We need the fit-for-purpose Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, as it is, in order to secure food for the entire UK and not simply to fix the protocol for the people of the Province, although that really should be enough of a reason to implement it. I look to the Minister to be committed to it, as it will put us on an equal status with everywhere else. That is as it should be.

October 30, 2022
Munira Wilson – 2022 Speech on the National Food Strategy and Food Security

The speech made by Munira Wilson, the Liberal Democrat MP for Twickenham, in the House of Commons on 27 October 2022.

Given all the chat about chickpeas, I feel compelled to join in and recommend my mother’s chickpea curry or my very own Moroccan-spiced lamb shank with chickpeas. Hon. Members who want the recipes may get in touch later.

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Tatton (Esther McVey) and the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) on securing this important debate. The motion before the House notes the impact of the cost of living crisis and calls for the urgent publication of the national food strategy White Paper. I presume the White Paper will build on the Government’s food strategy, which was published back in June but was, as the hon. Member for Bristol East noted, fairly disappointing and vague in its commitments, rather than a detailed response to the Dimbleby review, which spanned two volumes and more than 400 pages.

The most glaring omission from the Government’s food strategy is how they plan to feed hungry children. That is even more glaring given that the very first recommendation in part 1 of the Dimbleby national food strategy was to extend free school meals to all households on universal credit. As that report states:

“A hot, freshly-cooked school lunch is, for some children, the only proper meal in the day, providing a nutritional safety net for those at greatest risk of hunger or poor diet.”

In the majority of schools, however, only children from very low-income households—meaning an annual income of £7,400 before benefits—are eligible for free school meals after the age of seven. That threshold is much too low—I completely agree with Henry Dimbleby. That recommendation was so central to his thinking that when it became clear that the Government were not willing to make that financial commitment, he offered them the less generous alternative—in part 2 of the report—of increasing the household income threshold to £20,000, but the Government still have not moved. All we got in the Government food strategy was a vague commitment to

“continue to keep free school meal eligibility under review”.—[Official Report, 8 September 2022; Vol. 719, c. 486.]

The Government’s position cannot hold much longer, because they know it is economically, morally and politically unsustainable amid this cost of living crisis. We know from the DWP’s own data, published in part 2 of the Dimbleby report, that nearly half the families living in food insecurity—those who are skipping meals or not eating when they are hungry because they cannot afford it—do not qualify for free school meals because the earnings threshold is too low.

A few weeks ago, at one of my constituency surgeries, I met a mother who had fled an abusive partner and was skipping her mental health medication because she was trying to save the money she would have spent on her prescription to enable her daughter to have lunch at college. That is the reality of this policy.

Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)

Like the hon. Lady, I hope free school meals are realised across the rest of the United Kingdom. Will she congratulate the Scottish Government on introducing free school meals for all primary school pupils between primary 1 and 5, with a view to expanding it to primary 6 and 7? Every child in Scotland living in a household in receipt of universal credit gets a free school meal. Does she acknowledge that it can be done if there is the political will?

Munira Wilson

I am happy to congratulate the Scottish Government, as it has long been Liberal Democrat policy to extend free school meals to all primary-age children. I am happy to welcome that development in Scotland.

The new Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities—or the old one, because they keep changing—the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), told a Conservative party conference fringe event that he is in favour of expanding free school meals to all children on universal credit. The case for expanding free school meals is compelling because it is not just a welfare intervention but a health and education intervention.

The Dimbleby review reminds us:

“Children who are hungry at school struggle to concentrate, perform poorly, and have worse attendance records. More generally, children who experience food insecurity suffer worse physical and mental health outcomes.”

I appreciate that I am making the case for greater public spending when the Government are desperately searching for efficiency savings, otherwise known as cuts, to pay for their botched Budget but, as with much of education and children’s policy and spending, I ask Ministers to view this as an investment in our children’s future and our country’s future. A PwC analysis found that, over 20 years, every £1 spent on free school meals for all children on universal credit would generate £1.38 in return, including £2.9 billion in increased lifetime earnings.

The Government are keen to move people off social security and into work, yet their current policy creates a huge poverty trap that actively deters families with children from increasing their hours. A single mum with three children would have to earn £3,100 a year more after tax to make up for the shortfall of crossing the eligibility threshold for free school meals. That is nonsense.

I am proud that Liberal Democrat Ministers fought tooth and nail with Conservative Ministers in the coalition Government to introduce free school meals for every infant pupil. I am proud that Liberal Democrat Richmond Council has, this half-term, prioritised free school meal vouchers, even though the Department for Education does not fund free school meals during half-term. I am proud that it was a former Liberal Democrat Education Minister in Wales who, during the pandemic, led the way in ensuring that children got free school meals in every school holiday when the Westminster Government had to be shamed by Marcus Rashford into doing the same for English children.

Liberal Democrat Members will continue to campaign for every child living in a household receiving universal credit to get a free healthy school meal. During the cost of living crisis, we think there is a strong case for extending free school meals to all primary schoolchildren. If that is too much for the Minister to stomach, I beg him, as an absolute bare minimum, to agree to speak to his colleagues in the Department for Education about increasing the £7,400 threshold. The threshold has not increased since it was introduced in 2018, yet prices have risen by almost 16%.

The Government’s food strategy reminds us that school food is an invaluable lifeline for many children and families, especially those on low incomes, but with 800,000 children living in poverty not eligible for free school meals and with one in four households with children now living in food insecurity, too few children who need a free lunch are getting one.

One school leader in the north of England told me last week that, for the first time ever, parents were coming into some of his schools asking for a loaf of bread or a pint of milk. He is now contemplating the introduction of a free evening meal for many children in his academy trust. He is not sure how he will pay for it, because we know that nine in 10 schools will be in deficit by next September.

I read this morning that our new Prime Minister thinks education is a silver bullet, and I agree. It is the reason why I am in politics. I believe education can open doors and opportunities for every child, no matter what their background, but a hungry child cannot learn. The moral and economic case for taking action on this issue is clear. Ministers must urgently intervene so that no child goes hungry at school.

October 30, 2022
Ben Lake – 2022 Speech on the National Food Strategy and Food Security

The speech made by Ben Lake, the Plaid Cymru MP for Ceredigion, in the House of Commons on 27 October 2022.

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown). I agreed with a great deal of what he said, and I should like to elaborate on some of the themes of his speech, particularly his exhortation for us to grow more of our own food in the United Kingdom. That is not only good for UK farmers and growers, but good for the health of people across these islands. It will also help us to reduce our climate footprint when we lessen our dependence on imports and global supply chains.

I do not want to labour the point, but this will be the focus of my speech. I believe that self-sufficiency plays an important part in food security, and we need to concentrate on that. A DEFRA report on food security published in 2021 stated that the UK was about 75% self- sufficient in foodstuffs that could be produced domestically. The actual consumption of UK-produced food was about 54%, which means that we were importing some 46% of the food that we consumed. When I first came across that statistic, I was interested and, indeed, shocked by the discrepancy between the two figures, but it makes much more sense when we recognise that there is a considerable variance in the level of self-sufficiency in different types of food. For example, we are 100% self-sufficient in oats and barley and lamb. That is an important statistic for me, as a proud Member for a Welsh constituency. It then goes up to 90% self-sufficiency in wheat—we heard from the hon. Member for Hendon (Dr Offord) about the real contribution that wheat growers on these islands have made in the past year—and 80% in oilseed. However, the figure stands at only 54% for fresh vegetables and 16% for fresh fruit. In discussing food security, we need to consider the foodstuffs—fruit and vegetables in this particular example—of which we clearly need to grow more.

The dependence on global supply chains for so many of our imports means that, as the hon. Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) explained, we are vulnerable and exposed to shocks—be they geopolitical, climate, production or logistical—that are completely beyond our control. This Parliament has perhaps experienced a few unprecedented global shocks, the first being the covid pandemic, which wrought havoc on a lot of our food production and imports, and then, more recently, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has had a significant impact not only on grains, wheat and sunflower oil, but on many of the import costs for domestic production—I will talk more about that.

When we look to the future of our food security, increasing climate change poses a significant risk. I mentioned that we are self-sufficient to the tune of only 16% of the fruit that we consume. DEFRA’s food security report notes that:

“There are concerns about water availability for fruit and vegetable production in many of the countries on which the UK currently depends”,

particularly on the equator, but also in the Mediterranean region.

When we discuss food security, we need to think about growing more of our own. Other Members have mentioned the shocking impact that food inflation is having on families across the country. I do not wish to labour that point further, but for a number of foodstuffs, the problem could be alleviated to some extent if we had greater self-sufficiency in the categories that they relate to.

The hon. Member for The Cotswolds, who I hope will forgive me for referring to him so often—I thought he made an excellent speech—mentioned the Groceries Code Adjudicator and the power of the supermarkets. It is not right for them to balance their books, or indeed to profit, on the backs of the nation’s poorest families. We know that some of their increasing costs are not being fed back to the primary producers. As we have discussed this afternoon, rising import costs—particularly for fertiliser and feedstock—and high fuel and energy costs are having an impact on primary producers, who are not getting higher prices for their goods from the supermarkets and their suppliers. The Government need to look again at how they can make the system fairer.

Personally, I think there is much to be said for moving away from the more globalised food system to a more local one. In that regard, I recognise that a great deal of work needs to be done to reinvest in the processing facilities that were once very local but have now been lost, such as mills, abattoirs and the like. They were once a feature of every village in rural areas; now, they are seldom found.

The rising costs on farmers are being fed through the system and, in turn, into shopping bills, but are not being recompensed by the major supplier and supermarkets. That is a serious issue that could be addressed by greater self-sufficiency. The food strategy is an opportunity to consider a holistic way of ensuring that more of the food that we consume is produced on these islands.

Jo Gideon

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that consumers also need to be re-educated on the fact that strawberries do not grow for 12 months of the year, for example, and supermarkets will inevitably have different offers of our own produce at different times of the year?

Ben Lake

I entirely agree. We should set an ambition not only to be self-sufficient in the food that we produce, but to move down to a more local and seasonal food system. One of my peeves is that it is still possible to buy fresh strawberries on Christmas Eve—consider the environmental cost, if nothing else. We as a society are sadly ignorant to that, and we need to learn it again.

I am conscious that I am running out of time, so I will finish with a warning to the Government: in our move—I hope—to becoming more self-sufficient in our food production, we must remember that we need producers to do the work on the land and, as the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) said, in our seas. I am afraid that in a recent survey, NFU Cymru found that of the 700 farmers it spoke to, 71% intended to reduce production in the next year, and a significant number of them were also questioning whether to continue farming in the years to come, as a result partly of higher costs, yes, but also of the cumulative impact of many years of not getting a fair deal from some of the larger supermarkets for the price of the goods that they grow and rear.

Finally, I am very concerned—I think the Government can return to this—about the need for proper land-use planning and consideration. I know that the administrative burden would cross the four nations of the United Kingdom, but we know exactly the types of land that we have, down to the field level. At the moment, I fear that when it comes to certain carbon-offsetting schemes, prime agricultural land is being sold, often to corporations that intend to greenwash their own emissions rather than contributing to the nationwide effort to reduce our carbon footprint.

Even the Green Finance Observatory has expressed concerns about the current UK emissions trading scheme system. It states:

“The elephant in the room is that offsets are fundamentally not about mitigating climate change, or even about removing past emissions, but about enabling future emissions, about protecting economic growth and corporate profits.”

Too often—and, I am afraid to say, in Ceredigion—too many farms that were prime agricultural productive land have been bought by such corporations not to reduce their emissions, but to greenwash them so that they can continue business as usual. In so doing, they reduce our own productive capacity.

October 30, 2022
Geoffrey Clifton-Brown – 2022 Speech on the National Food Strategy and Food Security

The speech made by Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the Conservative MP for The Cotswolds, in the House of Commons on 27 October 2022.

I am grateful to have caught your eye in this important debate, Madam Deputy Speaker. May I say how delighted I am to see the Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood (Mark Spencer) back on the Front Bench? That is great news, because he really does know a great deal about the subject.

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Tatton (Esther McVey) on opening the debate. I look forward to being invited to have some of her excellent chickpea soup, preferably garnished with some excellent Tatton beef. I also congratulate the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy). Having spent years disagreeing with her in rural debates, I agreed with nearly everything she said. On chickpeas, I hope that she agrees that one of the great challenges for British agriculture is to produce more pulses and a greater variety of them. That is absolutely possible with new varieties.

The national food strategy is an important milestone, and Henry Dimbleby was an important contributor. This week, as hon. Members have said, the price of staple foods including bread, tea, potatoes and vegetable oil has absolutely soared. Data from the Office for National Statistics collected thousands of prices from items available on supermarket websites, and food price inflation is staggering. When we look at the percentage changes in the prices of the lowest-cost products between September 2021 and 2022 we see that vegetable oil is up by 65%, pasta by 59.9%, tea by 46%, bread by 37%, and milk by 29.4%. These price increases are huge, making the weekly shop for many people simply unaffordable. The differences in price seem to be starkest in the case of food staples as opposed to luxury items: for example, the price of orange juice is actually down by 8.9%, while the price of wine has increased by only 2%. The impact on food staples will be catastrophic for those living on the breadline, who are already having to budget tightly to feed their families each week.

Food and energy prices are highly regressive, causing more of those on low incomes to pay much more as a percentage of their budgets than those higher up the income scale. Increasing food prices will soon become as big a problem as the increase in energy prices, to which much more attention has been paid in the House and elsewhere. As has already been said, 18% of all households have experienced food insecurity in the last month.

Supermarkets should be doing more to compete with each other and try to hold prices down, even if it has an impact on their profits. After all, that is what they are dictating to their suppliers—often small suppliers, some of whom will not survive this latest bout of cost and food inflation. The country’s largest supermarket, Tesco, has taken steps to ease the costs for its customers. Despite falls in profits, it is freezing prices on more than 1,000 products, while at the same time increasing the hourly rate of pay in its stores to £10.98 to help its workers.

While costs in supermarkets are soaring, the increased costs of fertiliser and feed, exacerbated by Russia’s war in Ukraine, will cause a crisis for some farmers who will undoubtedly cease to trade. The cost of potatoes in the supermarkets has recently been hiked by 13.2%, whereas farmers have seen only a 5% rise this year. I know that the hon. Member for Bristol East will disapprove, but British Sugar is to increase its wholesale sugar price by 40% by the end of the month, while sugar beet farmers have seen a substantive increase of only 30% this year, which is the first increase in three years. All this is happening in an environment where the price of fertiliser—the main cost to farmers—has increased by 300% in the last 18 months.

DEFRA urgently needs to discuss this matter with the supermarkets. They should not be raising their prices for customers by more than the increase for their suppliers, and they certainly ought not to be increasing shareholders’ profits on the back of the poorest in the country. In short, they should be exercising restraint for a short period to get us over this financial crisis. They should also continue the policy that some began during covid, and buy British wherever possible.

It is important for the Government to continue with their environmental land management scheme re-evaluation to see whether taking land out of food production for environmental schemes such as tree-planting and rewilding balances with the need to maintain the land to grow food sustainably, and to protect our own food security. In the current circumstances, in which the cost of food is so high and the poorest in our society —as has already been said—are having to rely on food banks to feed themselves, it is our duty to ensure that we can produce as much of our own food as possible to meet demand.

David Rutley (Macclesfield) (Con)

My hon. Friend is making a powerful case, because he knows a great deal about this subject—as does my right hon. Friend the Minister. Does he agree that, given the challenges we are facing, it is right to start focusing on tackling food waste? I recently met representatives of a potato business in my constituency, E. Park & Sons, and Sodexo, one of one its major clients. That focus will not just help them and their bottom line, but ensure that food is more available in these difficult times.

Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown

My hon. Friend has raised a point that is important in two respects: it applies not only to the food retailers and processors but to individuals in their homes, where far too much food waste goes on.

As an island nation, we should not be over-reliant on imports or the global market with the shocks that can come with that, the most recent case being the war in Ukraine. In the 1980s, our self-sufficiency in food was 75%; it has now fallen to only 60%. We need to encourage as much food production in this country as possible, so that more of the food we eat is grown in this country to keep prices at a sustainable level. Since August 2021, imports of food and live animals have increased rapidly, while exports have barely moved.

I fully recognise that environmental schemes such as tree-planting and soil improvement schemes to prevent our rivers from being polluted will help to slow climate change and improve our natural environment. However, it is also the case that as global temperatures warm, vast swathes of countries near the equator will inevitably produce less food, which means that temperate countries such as ours will have to produce more to feed the world.

Environmental and animal welfare issues are often forgotten. Either animals are having to be transported for long distances to be slaughtered, or environmental damage is caused by shipping or, worse still, flying food for vast distances across the world. The way to improve the situation is to ensure that animals are slaughtered as humanely as possible close to the farm where they are kept, and to ensure that all food around the world is consumed as close as possible to the point of production whenever that is practicable.

Let me say this sincerely to my right hon. Friend the Minister: we need to be very careful about taking land out of production. It makes no sense for a 2,000-acre good-quality arable farm in Essex which was formerly growing wheat, barley, rape and field beans to be encouraged to put all its land down to grass under the countryside stewardship scheme. Let me also say to the hon. Member for Bristol East that while I fully accept that we should be taking some of our poorest land out of production for environmental schemes, we should be very careful about taking our best land—particularly grade 1 and 2 land, in the old parlance that was used when I was training —out of production for non-food-producing schemes.

No one is keener on improving and protecting the natural environment than I am. Those of us who are lucky enough to live in the Cotswolds are eager to protect its natural beauty, and I pay tribute to my Cotswolds farmers for not only producing some of the best lamb in the country but participating fully in environmental schemes to improve biodiversity. On the other hand, everyone in the world is reliant, wherever possible, on a good supply of food at a reasonable price. If we are to reduce the amount of food that we import and have a long-term sustainable food policy, we must do more to grow and process our own food. That will help to bring down the cost of our basic food staples, helping individuals and families to shop for food without fear of what it will cost. I imagine that so many are unable to do that at present. Equally, we in the UK have the most beautiful countryside and rivers in the world, in which we need to be careful to preserve our biodiversity.

October 30, 2022
Geraint Davies – 2022 Speech on the National Food Strategy and Food Security

The speech made by Geraint Davies, the Labour MP for Swansea West, in the House of Commons on 27 October 2022.

In 2010, when the Labour Government left office, there were 26,000 people getting food from food banks. By 2021, that had increased a hundredfold to 2.6 million, and that was before the Ukraine war. Now, one in four children and one in five adults—4 million children and 10 million adults—are in food poverty, in the sixth richest country in the world. That is a catastrophe. The number of people who are in food poverty, who cannot afford to eat nutritious food and who are freezing in their house, is much, much higher than it was during the pandemic.

I am a member of the Co-operative party and the Labour party. We agree with the right to food. The right to life is in the UN charter and the UN convention on human rights, and obviously an intrinsic part of the right to life is the right to food. I support Co-op party initiatives such as Healthy Start vouchers, and it is important that they be rolled out and index-linked to keep up with inflation, but we need much more.

The co-operative movement was started by the Rochdale pioneers to stop adulterated food. It is about food, and everybody should have the right to daily nutritional food. Winston Churchill famously said that the most important asset of a country is its health; a country’s health is predicated on having enough healthy food, and the reality is that people do not have enough money to buy healthy food after taking account of the housing costs and the heating costs that they face. Amartya Sen, a famous Nobel prize winner, wrote about famines: he was focused on the developing world, but he argued that famines are not about a shortage of food, but about the conjunction of high prices with low wages in particular communities, leading to starvation.

That is what we are now on the brink of seeing in Britain. High prices are coming in—yes, because of Ukraine, but also from Brexit. The price of imports is going down as the value of sterling has gone down. We have shortages in our own production: a quarter of our fruit is not picked, we have had a mass culling of 40,000 pigs and we do not have enough people to work in abattoirs. We have problems with food production locally and with sterling being further pushed down, which is driving prices up. Some of those problems were avoidable political problems.

Alongside high prices, we have low wages. Since 2010, we have had very low growth and pay freezes. In the previous 10 years under the Labour party, or certainly in the 10 years to 2008, the economy grew by 40%. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has shown that if that trend in growth had continued, average wages would now be £10,000 higher. The country would be much more resilient to the external shocks that are now causing this catastrophe of localised famine.

The Government need to act, and act quickly. They need to think carefully about how to manage the upcoming new Budget. I know everybody thinks the national insurance abolition idea is great on the face of it, but the reality is that it will give £7.60 back to the lowest 10% and more than £1,000 back to the richest 10%. At a time when half of people on universal credit are in food poverty, we need to think very carefully about how we sustain our people and about what is right and what is effective for our nation.

We have talked about the quality of our food, but the truth is that people in poverty are often obese because they have to resort to low-nutrition, high-fat, high-salt, high-sugar products that keep them going for a long time but are not particularly good for them. That is storing up a time bomb for the NHS of obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and strokes. Health inequality is a real problem for us. Famously, in a 2014 study of many countries over many years, the OECD found a relationship between inequality and growth, namely that less inequality means higher growth and a bigger cake.

Health inequality is also linked to income inequality. I look forward to the White Paper, but we need to be serious. We need to feed our people to get a productive economy and a fair economy that we can all be proud of. I am from Wales, and I am very pleased about the initiatives in Wales that are providing universal free breakfasts and are now rolling out universal free lunches. For all children—for all the adults who sign their children up—that will be free in Wales. Henry Dimbleby, whose strategy I very much welcome, has welcomed that. When questioned by the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, on which I serve, about universal credit and levels of payment to make food affordable, he said:

“That is beyond my pay grade.”

But it is not beyond the Government’s pay grade to realise what the issues are. If children have affordable, nutritious food, their performance is better, their life chances are better, future tax revenues are better and NHS costs are lower. From UK plc’s point of view it makes a lot of sense, quite apart from being morally right.

I spoke only this week to an online audience of student unions across Wales. That was one group, of course, and I am not saying that they are the only group, but as hon. Members might expect, they face high rents, they live in houses in multiple occupation and their food costs and energy costs have gone up. A large proportion of them have something like £10 a week or less to live on after paying for utilities. They cannot afford their student learning materials. More than 90% of them face mental health problems. There is a cost of living crisis, and they also face an uncertain future in the jobs market and the mortgage market. We need to think very carefully about that.

Finally, I turn to food security. Having invaded the Crimea, Russia is now producing 15% more food. We should think about our food security. The cost of fertiliser has gone up, and we are reliant on too much. Our home production should be organic. We need spatial planning. We need a proper plan so that we do not end up with another wave of austerity that costs 300,000 lives. Instead, we should focus on the opportunity to provide all our people with decent food. We need a healthy and productive economy that is more equal and fairer, and a stronger, greener future for all, but I fear that that will only come with a Labour Government.

October 30, 2022