Leadership1 publisher2 min readPublished
More than 150 experts press Burnham to create new national food storage schemes
More than 150 academics, business leaders and food groups have told Andy Burnham's government that Britain has no plan to feed people in a crisis. The official measures so far target household cupboards, so buffer stock along the supply chain stays each food business's own cost.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
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What happened
- The letter says the just-in-time delivery system is unfit for current and future challenges, because little stock is held along the chain and the UK has no national food storage.
- Ministers wound up the strategic food stockpile, which had been in place since the second world war, in the 1990s.
- Among five demands, the signatories want local food resilience committees set up under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004.
- Environment secretary Angela Eagle has advised households to store enough food and water to last a few days without power or water.
- Weeks earlier, the National Audit Office said ministers had not done enough to help households and businesses plan for possible emergencies.
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Why it matters
- constraint A supply shock this winter would have to be absorbed by stock that firms and households already hold, because ministers have no national reserve to release.
- decision Grocers and processors setting winter stock levels now have to treat buffer inventory as their own expense, since the government's announced campaign is aimed at household cupboards.
- exposure If ministers commission the proposed audit, government would examine how much of the UK's food supply depends on a few very large companies.
The Cabinet Office is to launch a campaign telling households to stock up on tinned food [18]. The government's Prepare website already lists tinned meat, fruit or vegetables that need no cooking [19]. The letter says ministers have given too little thought to what such a store should hold, and have not considered that many lower-income households cannot afford to build one [14]. Prof Tim Lang of the Centre for Food Policy at City St George's, University of London, one of the signatories, said: "Communities and households cannot resolve faultlines in the UK's food system." [15] He wants "storage at multiple levels, not just households" [15].
For a food business, the gap is further up the chain, between the importer and the shelf. The signatories include business leaders as well as academics and community groups [2]. They describe a system "driven by the pursuit of private profit rather than resilience" [6]. For an operator, the trade-off is plain. A firm can carry stock, with the cash and space that takes, or it can run lean and assume supply keeps arriving. Each firm makes that call on its own books, and no public reserve has stood behind it since the stockpile was wound up [4].
Several of the threats on the letter's list are inside a company's own operations. It names "geopolitics, climate heating, ransomware, energy outages, software malfunction and disinformation" [5]. Ransomware at a distributor or a failed ordering system is a continuity problem for the firm that runs it, whatever ministers decide about national storage.
The timing splits in two. Eagle's advice is tied to this winter and the warnings about El Niño [13]. The letter's structural demands take longer, and I would not expect any of them to be in place this winter. They include storage schemes at national, regional, local and community level [9], plus more decentralised supply and food production realigned around nutritional needs [10]. Eagle has said she will oversee farming improvements and a reservoir-building programme [20]. Prof Paul Behrens of the Oxford Martin School, another signatory, said: "Food resilience, healthy diet and environmental benefits all point in the same direction: grow more of the vegetables, fruit and pulses people actually need, closer to home." [17]
The demand that reaches furthest into the industry is the audit of the UK's reliance on a few very large food companies and on food imports [8]. The government's own research already finds the UK more reliant on food imports than some of its neighbours [12]. If ministers commission that audit, it will start from the stock levels that large grocers and processors set this quarter.
What to watch
- Whether the Cabinet Office campaign goes beyond household tins to any guidance or support for food businesses that hold stock.
- Whether ministers commission the audit of reliance on a few very large food companies and imports, and which firms it covers.
- Whether the government answers the letter and the National Audit Office with any national or regional food storage scheme before winter.