Andy Burnham’s Food Policy: Will Climate Get a Look-In?

As the new prime minister spends his early days in office focusing on living standards, could it be that the most useful clues to his views on food policy are to be found in his past?

Nick Hughes

“This is what the climate crisis looks like,” said Andy Burnham as the new prime minister expressed his horror at the devastating flash floods that recently claimed hundreds of lives on the Nepal-China border.

Burnham subsequently confirmed he will attend the COP31 climate summit in Turkey in November, as he delivered a statement in Parliament on the first day back from recess sketching out the direction in which he intends to lead the country.

It marked a subtle but potentially significant shift in how the UK’s latest prime minister has spoken of the climate crisis since taking office in July.

Burnham’s initial response – or lack thereof – to the heatwaves, wildfires and drought conditions that swept the UK throughout the summer had caused alarm within the environmental community.

A government plan to consult on cutting the target for electric vehicles to as little as 50% of all new cars in 2030, down from 80% under existing rules, was an early cause of angst.

Burnham’s equivocation over the totemic decision of whether to allow new drilling at the Rosebank and Jackdaw oil fields also seemed at odds with a country sweltering under an omnipotent sun. Environmental groups said permitting extraction at the fields should be inconceivable after five heatwaves this summer, with Greenpeace telling the prime minister it was a “Rubicon that he must not cross”. (The latest reports suggest he may well choose to cross it.)

Burnham also faced criticism for the sheer length of time it took for him to mention the words climate change in the context of the hottest UK summer ever recorded. “Without naming the cause of our rapidly changing environment, you will be unable to adequately prepare the country for the adaptations it will need to make, and the efforts needed to cut carbon emissions rapidly,” wrote a coalition of NGOs under the banner of the Green New Deal Rising campaign group.

Other critics adopted a less diplomatic tone. “Your inability to mention the hot and sweaty elephant in the corner of the room is inexplicable and irresponsible beyond words and logic,” fumed Transition Network co-founder Rob Hopkins on social media.

Farmers were another group left feeling ignored by the new prime minister. As growers surveyed their parched fields and baked crops, and brought in the earliest harvest of their working lives, the government response for a long time seemed tin-eared. Burnham did finally link the wildfires with climate change in mid-August, but measures to ban the sale of disposable barbecues and activate the national alert system felt like a case of closing the stable door after the horse had long since bolted.

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Just as farming groups were reaching the end of their tether, a new package of support was hastily cobbled together in mid-August. Burnham headed west alongside recently anointed farming minister, Stephen Morgan, to meet farmers and announce a £65m funding boost for England that includes more flexibility in environmental schemes so that farmers affected by drought can continue to receive payments while taking practical steps to protect livestock, crops and land.

The package includes £15m in funding to help farmers build on-farm reservoirs so they can store water and become more resilient to future droughts. “If this is delivered alongside meaningful changes to planning, reduced bureaucracy and abstraction reform it is very welcome investment in desperately needed on farm infrastructure that underpins the resilience of the food system,” said NFU president Tom Bradshaw.

Ben Collins, chairman of the British Onion Producers’ Association, was rather more sanguine, telling Footprint’s The Small Print podcast that although “a really nice gesture”, the £15m “just doesn’t touch the sides” given his estimate that an investment of around £1m is needed to build a reservoir capable of irrigating just 50 hectares of crops.

Tangible difference

If anything has characterised Burnham’s opening weeks as prime minister it has been his desire to announce measures that make a small but tangible difference to people’s lives – cutting VAT on electricity bills; reinstating the £2 cap on bus fares; reducing business rates for pubs, social clubs and live music venues.

Burnham wants change to be felt within the country; yet the challenges facing modern Britain will at some point require a more high-powered response. A week following his farm visit, the NFU was warning that Britain’s farmers and growers are at a financial crisis point as the worst drought in 50 years has resulted in historically low harvests, stunted grass growth and caused field crops to fail because of a lack of water. The crisis has been compounded by increased production costs for fuel, fertiliser and energy due to the war in the Middle East. Without immediate action, the NFU warned next year’s food production and the future of the next generation of farmers are at risk.

Ministers have begun adopting the message, long espoused in the food policy world, that food security is national security. Yet the claim made in Defra’s press release announcing the farming package that “the UK has a resilient food system, and the dry weather is not expected to affect national food security” did not land as convincingly as ministers may have hoped. In a blog, Charlie Taverner of the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission wrote: “We do need more reservoirs and ponds. We do need more drought-resistant strains of wheat and barley. But we shouldn’t kid ourselves that the UK will be much more secure as a result.”

Taverner went on to argue: “The real work lies in making the food economy fundamentally more resilient. One with stronger bones, reserves to draw on in moments of stress, and the diversity and flexibility to deal with unpredictable attacks.”

Growth frazzled

Back in Parliament on the first day after recess, Burnham and leader of the opposition, Kemi Badenoch, traded their diagnoses of the UK’s anemic economic growth and how they planned to turbocharge the economy. Neither chose to reference the ‘Hot summer economics’ report published by Triodos Bank in August, which modelled a loss in total EU-wide GDP of 1% or €180bn (£155bn) from the extreme summer heat – equivalent to the entire expected economic growth for the EU this year. Lower agricultural output and higher food prices; constrained energy production and higher electricity prices; transport disruption and increased transportation costs; and reduced labour productivity are all in part to blame.

These are early days for the Burnham government; the forthcoming Labour Party conference and November’s budget should offer a clearer sense for how the new administration plans to balance short-term interventions with long-term structural change in the economy, and how Burnham and his team intend to prepare the UK to deal with a cocktail of era-defining challenges – from climate change and the growing threat of global conflict, to migration and the march of AI. We may even get a sense for whether the extreme weather experienced over the summer will act as a catalyst for more decisive action on climate change mitigation and food security, or whether memories quickly faded once the temperatures dropped and the rains came.

Food questions

And what of wider food policy under Burnham? Can clues to his policy platform be found in his previous words and deeds? In a recent blog, Sustain highlighted the creation of a food security action network across Greater Manchester during Burnham’s time as mayor as evidence of his preoccupation with “the role of government in guaranteeing the essentials of life”. Under his leadership Greater Manchester also became the first combined authority in England to endorse the principle of a right to food, something Burnham referenced in conversation with Henry Dimbleby and Dolly van Tulleken for the 2024 ‘Nourishing Britain’ report, funded by Impact on Urban Health and Nesta.

“I would bring through a right to food. It’s not discretionary, is it? It’s essential and therefore everybody should have it,” said Burnham in response to the question of what he would do as prime minister. Proponents argue that a ‘Good food bill’ is the perfect place to house such a fundamental right within legally-binding food system targets to inform future policy design.

Burnham went on to cite corporate lobbying, including from the commercial television sector, as one of the main barriers he faced as health secretary (between 2009 and 2010) in acting on obesity and food-related ill health.

He also shared his view that reformulation rather than “bans and taxes” was the most effective policy in achieving health benefits through diets, albeit the success of the soft drinks industry levy and underwhelming results from voluntary reformulation programmes for sugar and salt suggest the reality is rather different.

Another diagnosis was harder to argue with. “I don’t think food policy is a coherent whole, is it?” said Burnham, as he spoke of the need to “come up with a food policy that is coherent across that whole spectrum”.

Now, as prime minister, he has the chance to do just that by building on the national food strategy for England, ‘Towards a good food cycle’, published in July last year. The document currently sits on the Gov.uk website under the ominous disclaimer: “This was published under the 2024 to 2026 Starmer Labour government.” In a report published last week by the National Audit Office on resilience of the food supply chain to disruptions (also the subject of last week’s The Small Print podcast), the government watchdog revealed that Defra is still developing many of the supporting policies, plans and metrics to monitor improvement against the strategy’s 10 priority outcomes, which include the goal of ensuring greater preparedness of the food supply chain to disruptions. (Defra did not respond to questions from Footprint about whether achieving the outcomes is still official government policy and whether the metrics and indicators against which success will be judged have now been agreed.)

Burnham’s in-tray is bulging. Will food and climate policy get a look-in when the relentless demands of the job start to bear down on our latest PM? We’re about to find out.